Theatre Ariel has revealed the four shows that will make up its 2026-27 calendar. In marketing emails, the Jewish theater company is referring to its 36th year as “a season of movement.”

That’s because all four plays — “The Melting Pot,” “Rabbi Sam,” “The Scribe” and “Crossing Delancey” — feature main characters moving across distances and entering new periods in their lives.

But it could also serve as a description of Theatre Ariel at this moment.

Since COVID forced the organization to ditch its traditional living room shows, it has branched out to synagogues, JCCs and community theaters. This has increased the size of the typical Theatre Ariel audience from 20-50 people to more than 50.

In some cases, like a performance of “Amsterdam” in 2024-25, the company is filling a theater that can hold nearly 100 people. (That show took place at the 99-seat Christ Church Neighborhood House in Old City.)

“People have embraced the programs we’re doing at this new level. We want to continue to provide that opportunity for people to see these shows and have those experiences,” said Jesse Bernstein, Theatre Ariel’s producing artistic director.

But it’s not just bigger audiences. Last season, Theatre Ariel commissioned, developed and produced a play, “Marsha Blovotnick and the Marvelous Magical Chicken Soup,” for a mainstage production, with costumes, sets and lights, for the first time in two decades. A local playwright, Dan Kitrosser of South Philadelphia, created the story and wrote the script.

As a result of its growing audience and role, Theatre Ariel has been able to increase its number of donors, fundraising haul and budget. It has also been able to apply for better grants that can help the bottom line.

The first show of the new season, “The Melting Pot,” will be produced thanks in part to a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. The third play of 2026-27, “The Scribe,” will be part of the company’s Joey Fischer Mainstage Series, named for the sibling of the donor who gave one of the biggest gifts in Theatre Ariel’s 36-year history.

And in 2026-27, Theatre Ariel is planning to put on two mainstage performances for the first time. “The Scribe” will be performed at the Bluver Theatre in Center City, which has 65 to 70 seats, and “The Melting Pot” will be staged at the Arch Street Meeting House in Old City, which can hold 80 people.

Three Main Line synagogues — Har Zion Temple, Congregation Beth Am Israel and Temple Beth Hillel-Beth El — are also going to serve as hosts this season.

Bernstein, his staff and his board have worked hard to “increase our presence in the Jewish community and in the theater community,” the director said. The organization is also now a producer of mainstage shows and a developer of new stories.

It’s all part of a larger story about movement from those old living room shows to something bigger, but, in true Theatre Ariel fashion, still intimate.

“I think our shows can be a great place for people to come and spend time with friends, with family and with strangers and get reinvigorated in these dark times and reconnect with community and with their own Jewish, human selves,” Bernstein told Philadelphia Jewish Exponent a year ago ahead of the 2025-26 season.

Moving forward, Bernstein wants to continue to develop Jewish shows that can find a wider audience beyond Theatre Ariel. “Marsha Blovotnick and the Marvelous Magical Chicken Soup” will have a run in Portland, Oregon, this fall.

“We’re contributing those Jewish stories into the ecosystem,” Bernstein said.

The producing artistic director also hopes to hire more staff. He’s the only full-time employee of Theatre Ariel, though he works with two part-time staff members.

More staff will hopefully allow Theatre Ariel to “develop our audiences and also think about maybe doing some work for young audiences,” he said.

Before all that, though, Bernstein is just excited for another season.

“The Melting Pot,” set for late October and early November performances, is about a character who comes to America and “plans to write a symphony inspired by arriving immigrants,” according to theatreariel.org. “Rabbi Sam,” scheduled for late January and early February, features a man who leaves his job as a New York City tax attorney to become a rabbi at a California synagogue.

“The Scribe,” set to be performed in late March and written by Bernstein, was inspired by a thought experiment about what it would be like to be the man who compiled the books that make up the Torah while transitioning from exile in Babylon back to Jerusalem. “Crossing Delancey,” scheduled for two weekends in May, is the well-known play, which later became a movie, about a Jewish woman who is pulled back to her Lower East Side Jewish community by her bubbie’s insistence that she date Sam the pickle man.

The movement theme came together as Bernstein was “looking at the pieces.”

“I discovered that all of the main characters either had traveled or are in some way traveling, either physically or emotionally or both,” Bernstein said.

jsaffren@midatlanticmedia.com