From the roof of the Unicorn Theatre, you can see the future. It's under construction on a hill in downtown Kansas City, Mo., in the form of the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, a massive, looming $400 million–plus structure expected to open in fall 2011. Two theaters will be housed there—one with 1,800 seats, the other 1,600—that will dwarf the twin stages at the Unicorn, which has been producing plays since 1974.

Still, for Cynthia Levin, the Unicorn's producing artistic director, the behemoth growing in the near distance, which she can see from atop her space, is a sign that despite rough economic times, things are building toward the good for the theater scene in Kansas City. "It's incredible what's happening here," she said.

Theater and performing arts projects large and small have cropped up in several major cities in recent years, whether entirely new facilities or renovations of existing ones. They often offer the promise of revitalization for depressed urban areas and theater communities. But theater construction projects don't necessarily mean more jobs for actors.

In Kansas City, for example, the Kauffman Center won't have a resident theater company when it opens. Instead, in addition to hosting symphony and dance performances, it will welcome, according to its website, "smaller Broadway and Off-Broadway touring productions." In other cases, development projects aren't adding theater spaces, but just swapping new for old. For the most part, though, theater growth is viewed positively, a sign that things are headed in the right direction.

Take Miami, where the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts was completed five years ago; it includes a 2,400-seat opera house, a 2,200-seat concert hall, and a 300-seat theater. As host of the local theater group Teatro Avante's International Hispanic Theatre Festival (now in its 25th year), which runs this month, the Arsht Center "has given the festival the opportunity to become one of the best in the world," said Mario Ernesto Sanchez, Teatro Avante's producing artistic director.

In New York, a deal between local government agencies in late June cleared a funding hurdle for construction of the long-suffering Frank Gehry–designed performing arts space at the World Trade Center. That space, which has seen three prospective tenants leave over the years (including the city's Signature Theatre Company), will eventually house the Joyce Theater and is viewed as a key component in the revitalization of Lower Manhattan.

Back in Kansas City, Levin remembers when theater companies there were as common as, well, unicorns. Now she's seen a handful crop up in the last year alone. "I've been at the Unicorn for 31 years," she said, and in that time she's seen many artists and actors leave to pursue careers in Chicago or elsewhere. "Now they're coming back."

Many are moving to the city's Crossroads neighborhood—which, with its vacant warehouses and loft spaces, recalls SoHo in New York or SoMa in San Francisco—and creating small performance spaces there, Levin said.

None of that is expected to compete directly with the Kauffman Center. Ditto more-established theaters. But given that the Kansas City arts world relies heavily on private and corporate donations (since the municipal government doesn't kick in much), the theaters compete for the same foundation money.

Of the Kauffman Center, Levin said, "The only thing it does to a community of this size is it takes all of the funding dollars." Those dollars include a $12 million gift made in June by a local foundation. "Many foundations have put projects on hold because they've committed to this," she added.

The economic climate hasn't helped. Levin figures, from her own experience and talking to others, that outside funding was down 30 percent last year and attendance was off 20 percent. "The amazing thing is nobody closed," she said. "Everybody found a way to survive and scale back."

But not every city is hunkering down.

CAPITAL CONCERNS

"Washington is one of the arts boomtowns of America," said Howard Shalwitz, artistic director of the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, in the nation's capital. "No question about it."

When the theater company Arena Stage moves into its new home at the Mead Center for American Theater later this year, it will come at the end of nearly a decade of theater construction in D.C. and its suburbs. That includes a $9 million renovation at Woolly Mammoth, Shalwitz said.

Among various projects, he listed the Shakespeare Theatre Company's new Harman Center, a new space for the Studio Theatre, and a renovation for the Gala Hispanic Theatre. In the suburbs, there have been new facilities for the Round House Theatre in Bethesda, Md., and for the Signature Theatre in Arlington, Va.

The city heavily invested in many developments, Shalwitz said—including giving $2 million to Woolly Mammoth for its expansion—because it reasoned that it would make the money back through tax revenues gleaned from new restaurants and other amenities in revitalized parts of town. The Arena Stage space fits that model; the hope is it will help spark development along the waterfront, Shalwitz added.

But while myriad projects have provided a "huge facelift" for the city, he said, "the total number of seats added to the nightly inventory wasn't great." Even so, Woolly Mammoth is coming off a record year, according to Shalwitz.

The question now, he said, is for Washington theater to develop an identity, "where it's not just that there's great examples of theaters here, but also to make a mark on a national scale."

VIRGINIA IS FOR ACTORS

Years ago, when actor Laine Satterfield, a Richmond, Va., native, first heard about plans for the Richmond CenterStage theater complex, it made enough of a mark on her that she decided to move back. "It's one of the things that brought me back to Richmond after a 15-year hiatus," she said. That hiatus included doing the "Off-Broadway thing" in New York before heading to Italy, Denmark, Scotland, and London, and then Sun Valley, Idaho.

On a return trip to New York in 2005, during which she caught the Richmond Ballet at the Joyce Theater, she heard about the new theater project in her hometown. It included a renovated Carpenter Theatre, a 1,800-seat facility where Satterfield grew up performing in "The Nutcracker," as well as an education center, a music space, a gallery, and a 200-seat performance space.

CenterStage held its grand opening last September and many local companies performed, which in turn helped them raise their profiles, Satterfield said. That helped inspire a more collaborative atmosphere in the city, where companies and actors pool their resources and work together.

Satterfield, who started out working for the Richmond Ballet after her move back but who now teaches acting and dance at the School of the Performing Arts in the Richmond Community (which is holding its 30th-anniversary show at CenterStage), believes that esprit de corps is good for local actors and could be good for jobs.

But Bo Wilson, a 47-year-old Richmond native who acts, writes plays and scripts for training films, and does voiceover work, says it's still difficult to cobble together a living as an actor in Richmond, despite CenterStage. "One of the best actresses in town (in my opinion) is a young woman who is constantly rehearsing one show, performing another, propping a third, and doing the laundry/wardrobe chores for a fourth," he wrote in an email. "And she's still living at the ragged edge, economically."

It's not clear, then, what CenterStage will mean for the future of Richmond theater.

"While not being a producing entity nor an acting-job engine per se," CenterStage has "provided a pleasant home, a downtown presence (which we hope will contribute to the revitalization of the downtown corridor), and it has said to the world, 'We take performing arts seriously enough to commit space and bricks and mortar,' " Wilson wrote. "Those aren't easily quantified by existing economic metrics, but they seem like good things."