Executive director Yvonne Seggerman and artistic director Tony Estrella on the set of Awake and Sing!, opening Thursday at the Gamm Theatre.

The Providence Journal / Sandor Bodo

This week, actors at Pawtucket’s Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre will take to the stage for Clifford Odets’ seminal Awake and Sing!, the Depression-era drama about the struggling Berger family from the Bronx. Times are tough for the Bergers in the early 1930s, but the younger generation is not without a sense of hope and confidence.

And the same could be said about the people working behind the scenes at the Gamm, as the administration looks to a time of growth amid unrelenting news of economic hardship.

It was five years ago that a foundering Gamm moved from Providence’s Jewelry District to a new home at the Pawtucket Armory on Exchange Street, where its has been thriving despite a five-fold budget increase to more than $1 million. For the first time, said artistic director Tony Estrella, the theater, which had been run in a haphazard fashion by actors, began to resemble a business. And the changes have made a difference.

Last season, the theater played to 96 percent capacity. Subscribers now number more than 1,800, a far cry from the mere 96 stalwarts who followed Estrella and company to Pawtucket.

Once there, the Gamm set up shop in a former storage garage attached to the armory. The space has been turned into a welcoming, open performance area that seats about 130 patrons. But as the theater continues to prosper, it is looking to move into the cavernous, 11,000-square-foot drill hall in the main building, a brick structure next to Tolman High School that looks a little like a medieval castle.

There was, of course, always talk that the drill hall would be the Gamm’s ultimate home. But organizers had a lot of tasks to tend to when they first moved to the annex building. Dreams of a sparkling new theater with more than twice the seating capacity remained somewhere in the foggy distance.

But over the summer, the boards of the theater and the Pawtucket Armory Association, the landlord, went through some revamping. The two now share the same officers and a single executive director, Yvonne Seggerman, who has been with the Gamm since it arrived in Pawtucket and now spends most of her time planning the move to the armory, which also houses a high school for the performing arts.

Neither Seggerman nor Estrella is saying how much all this will cost. Plans are still too sketchy to put a price tag on them, they said. But Seggerman does have architectural drawings for the project, at least drawings of what might be possible for the space, and an estimated time line of about five years for completion — 3 1/2 to raise the money and 18 months for construction.

The move would make the Gamm, which has a small but dedicated following, a major player on the cultural scene, an organization with a 340-seat, state-of-the-art performance space that could be rented out to other groups. The theater could also keep its present performance space and do shows there as well, said Estrella.

The Armory Association is looking for a director of development to raise money for the project.

“All of the oars are in the water right now,” said Seggerman, “and all going in the same direction.”

But there is a long way to go, Estrella admits. Currently the Gamm is taking a long hard look at its budget and trying to brace for the worst as the economy continues to falter. The theater has already made two budget adjustments this season, in fact.

“We’re trying to be as realistic as possible,” said Estrella. “This is not a pie-in-the-sky thing.”

So far it is surviving. Seggerman said that the opening production of the season, Friedrich Schiller’s Don Carlos, did not do well, but that the follow-up play, Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, which dealt with ethics in politics, “struck a chord.” As for fundraising, Seggerman said the Gamm is “pretty much on track.”

“We will know more in another month,” she said.

But as a non-profit that is always at the mercy of donors, Estrella said the Gamm has learned survival strategies over the years. It has always had to be careful with money. “It’s always an uphill battle,” he said.

One big thing the Gamm has going for it is quality productions, shows that tend to parallel current issues and to take a fresh look at the material at hand. It has been putting on cutting-edge theater ever since it opened in an Olneyville mill 25 years ago, when it was known as Alias Stage. (The name change was prompted by a gift from philanthropist Alan Shawn Feinstein, who gave the money in memory of his sister.)

When it staged Macbeth at the old Elbow Street location in the Jewelry District, the audience sat in bleachers with wheels that were rolled about the space by actors as the scenes changed. After the murder of one of the characters, a Cadillac backed into the theater through a garage door, the body was loaded into the trunk, , and the car roared off.

But if you called for tickets to a show, you might not find anyone answering the phone.

The Gamm’s latest offering, Awake and Sing!, opens Thursday. While it often puts on plays that echo current events, the Odets classic, last revived in New York in 2006, was picked more for its importance in the history of the American theater than because it is set in the Depression.

Estrella, in fact, says the play is fairly upbeat, as opposed to Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, which was supposed to have been produced this month at Warren’s 2nd Story Theatre but was dropped because director Ed Shea thought this was not the time to do a play about a man who kills himself because he loses his job.

“It’s about creating confidence in your own ability to persevere,” said Estrella of the Odets play. When it premiered in 1935, it sort of marked the birth of realist American theater, said Estrella, predating Miller and Tennessee Williams in the 1940s and ’50s. It was first put on by the Group Theatre, which flourished in New York during the 1930s and to which Odets belonged. That original production was directed by Harold Clurman and starred Stella Adler and Sanford Meisner. The play’s success made Odets a star and the Group one of the leaders in new American drama.

On the afternoon before next Sunday’s show, Boston-area author Susan Quinn, who has just written a book about theater in the Depression and the New Deal projects that made putting on plays possible during that difficult time, will be presenting a slide show and signing books afterward. The talk is free from 5 to 6 p.m.. The play starts at 7.

Remaining shows in the season are Grace, a new play by Mick Gordon and scholar A.C. Grayling, which opens in March, and an adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, which ends the season in May.

Grace is about a natural-sciences professor who has become an outspoken critic of religion but whose life changes when her son leaves his job as a civil rights lawyer and joins the Anglican priesthood.

“We’re quietly putting one foot in front of another,” said Seggerman..

cgray@projo.com