Charleston theatre companies present a vast range of material in the coming season. The upcoming theatre season heralds a slight shake-up of the board-treading community, with Richard Futch entering his first full season as the Footlight Players’ new executive director, the addition of a strong ensemble series at Pure Theatre, and a new League of Charleston Theatres bringing everyone together for a season-long group hug. The five-strong huddle of local companies is still in its teething stage, so its effects won’t be noticeable for a while, but its goal of co-promotion and support formalizes the bonds of a community that this year seems more close-knit than ever.

Pure Theatre co-founder Rodney Rogers, for example, will direct Amadeus for the Footlight Players on Queen Street. College of Charleston professor of playwriting Franklin Ashley is currently directing Spinning into Butter for Pure, which opens next week, and his original death row drama The Delta Dancer will be performed by Theatre/’verv/ at Bar 145 on Calhoun St.

“Arts organizations are traditionally competitive and non-trusting,” says Theatre 99 and Have Nots! co-founder Greg Tavares, who’ll be directing November’s Reckless at Pure Theatre. “The League’s a wonderful, important, timely development. It will help with the cross-pollination that goes on, and the bringing in of guest directors.” He points out that Theatre 99 hasn’t been asked to join the League yet, but he shouldn’t feel left out for long -- the organization’s official line is that it will welcome new members once some official guidelines have been set, possibly as soon as January.

Tavares is involved in Pure’s ensemble series, which Rogers describes as “almost another company” in itself. The venture takes some pressure off Rogers and his wife, Pure’s artistic director Sharon Graci, who have found that the more shows they produce, the more successful they are.

With a 300-percent increase in subscriptions this year, Pure (season schedule below) has passed the initial stages of building a reputation for itself and finding an audience. Its main task now is to grow the solid following it’s gained from polished productions of powerful plays like True West and American Buffalo. “Our cast sizes are bigger this season,” says Rogers. “We’re trying to include more people. Spinning into Butter has a huge cast for us -- eight. It’s part of our plan to expand the scope of acting and character work but do it at a low cost, without having a helicopter landing on the stage or anything like that.”

In January, Pure will present Neil LaBute’s This Is How It Goes, a play with sharp points to make about an interracial love triangle that shakes up a small town. “Two of our plays deal a little with racism,” Rogers says. “We tend to cover society today and how people are dealing with it. The shows are mainly psychological. We’re not necessarily different from an Off-Off-Broadway theatre or a storefront theatre in Chicago. We’re more like a night on HBO or FX than somewhere that does musicals.”

If Pure resembles HBO in its programming, then the venerable Footlight Players (season schedule page 36) is more like NBC, relying mostly on tried-and-true standards to satisfy its audience. But instead of Law and Order they have song and dance. “We have three musicals this season,” says marketing chairperson Jennifer Metts, “including chapter three of the Della’s Diner series [Blue Plate Special -- The Della Syndrome], that always does well. But we have a couple of new things; Amadeus is something we haven’t done before, it’s very different from the 1984 movie. And A Thurber Carnival is an old ’60s Laugh-In-style of production. Those two shows are a departure for us.”

In October, Do Not Go Gentle takes the Footlights into more serious territory, despite sharing conceptual elements with Beetlejuice. It’s a small, emotive play that’s part ghost story and part character study, providing a rare instance of solid drama in a season of send-up (December’s Nuncrackers) and farce (Once Upon A Mattress next April).

In its 10th anniversary year, Art Forms and Theatre Concepts is still looking for a place to call home, after leaving downtown’s Humanities Center last year. They’re currently operating out of artistic director Art Gilliard’s Ashley Avenue home, preparing for their annual MOJA Festival show later in September.

This year, the company will present A Star Ain’t Nothing But a Hole in Heaven, a fast-moving comedy by Judi Ann Mason, co-writer of Sister Act 2. “It’s about a girl raised by her aunt and uncle after her mother dies in a fire,” says Gilliard. “It’s an important story.” The seven-strong cast has a wide age range, from high school to elderly, and four performers new to the company.

“We get to work with some younger people in this production,” Gilliard says. “Some of the cast have a lot of experience and some have a little. That makes things juicy.” The show opens in September at the Dock Street Theatre on Church Street.

The Actors’ Theatre of South Carolina (full disclosure alert: writer Nick Smith is a member of the Actors’ Theatre) is another company that lacks a permanent venue but is nonetheless celebrating its 10th anniversary. With its hopes pinned on a Fine Arts Center that’s planned as part of a reconstructed Folly Beach Library, the ATSC has meanwhile found a small but comfortable niche in the new Buxton’s East Bay Theatre for some of its productions. That means more tourist-friendly performances of Pirates! The Revenge of Colonel Rhett and Mister Poe’s Nightmares, just in time for Halloween. Its stand-out production this year looks to be a revival of 2: Goering at Nuremburg, which company co-founder Clarence Felder first made his own Off-Broadway a decade ago. The play will be produced as part of the Citadel Fine Art Series in November. Written by Romulus Linney, it offers a harrowing insight into the mind of Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering as he strives to justify his Nazi war crimes.

The Village Playhouse, in Mt. Pleasant’s Brookgreen Town Center (season schedule page 36), continues to mix crowd-pleasing spoofs with darker fare, including Lillian Hellman’s Toys in the Attic and John Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves, last performed at the College of Charleston three years ago. After an amicable co-production with The Company Company for last year’s Into the Woods, the two pair up again for the Stephen Sondheim musical drama A Little Night Music -- a favorite of co-producer Maida Libkin. Rather than pandering to audience whims, the bulk of the Playhouse’s fifth season consists of shows that the company members want to put on. “I’ve always wanted to do The Philadelphia Story,” says co-founder Keely Enright. “The challenge is going to be creating that world on our limited stage.”

The Village Playhouse also offers one of two Christmas Carol variations in the region this holiday season. “It’s a mind-blowing four-man play told from Jacob Marley’s point of view,” Enright says, “with no costumes and no sets, really. It relies on the actors to bring the story to life. It’s completely different from the other version that’s being performed this Christmas, and there’s definitely room for both.”

The “other version” is A Christmas Carol -- A Ghost Story of Christmas, an all-new, effects-heavy take on Dickens’ over-performed morality tale, courtesy of Charleston Stage Company in the Dock Street Theatre (season schedule below). This reflects an apparent attempt to provide shows that are reliable ticket sellers, while giving them a fresh twist to quash any audience ennui.

In contrast to Pure Theatre, Charleston Stage is cutting down on the number of productions this season. “We’ve decided that we can do it better if we’re not doing too many,” explains producing director Julian Wiles. Charleston’s biggest theatre company has been looking for material “overlooked from the past, that for one reason or another have not been done as much, or not in Charleston.”

This quest for productions that will seem fresh or unfamiliar to local audiences brings us Baby, the Broadway hit from Oscar-winning composer David Shire, and The Skin of Our Teeth. Our Town scribe Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Teeth is intended to pull in the same audiences who enjoyed last season’s off-kilter Omnium Gatherum. There’s also a follow-up of sorts to the recent family series Wild West Taming of the Shrew with A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream in Hellhole Swamp, which gives Shakespeare a distinctly Lowcountry twist. Another one-hour family show, The Hobbit, is also bound to fill seats in October thanks to the still-strong interest in all things Tolkein.

After a summer of short filmmaking, Stage and Screen Productions plans four shows this season. First up is Franklin Ashley’s The Delta Dancer, a chilling tale with a definite twist set in the South Carolina State Prison in Columbia, where the first state execution is about to take place after the federal government has reinstated the death penalty. Future productions will be The Eight: Reindeer Monologues, Beautiful, and Tom Stoppard’s witty thinkpiece Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

Stage and Screen’s theatrical division, Theatre/’verv/, is sticking with Bar 145 as a venue. This allows the company to present challenging shows that don’t consistently draw big crowds and still break even; with some consistent programming and creative marketing, ‘verv could build a dedicated audience in a similar, if lower-scale, way to Pure. “It’s a case of not catering to an audience but creating a show, then targeting a related demographic,” says Heather Gadol, a co-founder of the company. “Whatever the market, we’ll keep developing projects that entertain and make people think.”

Neck deep in blood and ruffs, CofC’s School of the Arts Dept. of Theatre (season schedule below) has plunged into its new season with its latest Shakespeare Project. After The Tempest and Titus Andronicus, which each continue through the first part of September, comes April Turner’s Chocolate on the Outside, a Piccolo hit back in 1998. Prolific playwright Jane Martin’s Talking With… features a series of monologues on enthusiasms that become obsessions, and there’s also Playwrights Tonight, an evening of original student-written work that’s another annual feature for SOTA. While the shows are intended as student projects first and foremost, the College’s choice of material remains thoughtfully selected and ambitious.

By far the largest amount of original material will come from Theatre 99. Now ensconced in its new home above the Bicycle Shoppe at 280 Meeting St., the company will be stepping up the rate of its programming.

“We have so many people who are performers now in our company,” says co-founder Brandy Sullivan, stressing that just because their shows are unscripted, that doesn’t make them any less valid than other theatrical experiences. “Improv Freight Train will run on Friday nights, featuring other groups in our family, sketch shows, and adaptations.” The Have Nots! improv group, which has been around for 10 years now, will perform every Saturday night, and this year’s Piccolo Fringe offering Kathy and Mo: Parallel Lives, a two hour, 20-character comedy from Sullivan and Robin Shuler, will be remounted in September.

“I find it exciting that you can produce independent theatre here,” says Have Not! Greg Tavares. “Like Theatre 99, Pure are flying by the seat of their pants, opening a theatre and doing shows there. We’re both enabling people to create independent theatre and empowering artists to create pieces that they own. We need that diversity of art here, and a diversity of venues to create art.”

While the well-established companies aren’t taking any big chances with their productions, audiences will be well catered to for this season. Newer companies like Pure and Theatre/’verv/ continue to grow and extend their repertoires, and the Theatre League members hope to increase audiences as they work together. Theatergoers have a great opportunity to back all of them up this season while enjoying some highly creative productions.