It wouldn’t be fair to compare the rapture of seeing scenes from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” performed at Shakespeare & Company’s 30th anniversary gala Saturday with the audience’s reaction to the news that the in Lenox, Mass., company is converting a 82,000 square-foot auditorium into a mixed-use facility housing an intimate theater, rehearsal studios, and scene and production shops.

Nevertheless, the company’s leaders and board members are enthusiastic about the plan, particularly 25-year-long supporter Elayne Bernstein of Great Neck, N.Y., who will have the new theater named after her.

As they see it, this project—paired with the company’s most ambitious fund-raising campaign to date, with a goal of $7.5 million — lays the groundwork for realizing the indeed rapturous idea of re-creating London’s 16th-century Rose Theater, where Shakespeare performed some of his early works.

“It’s a fulcrum point: To be able to actually have the space to operate in so that our programs can flourish at the level we know they can flourish, and to have them all in one place, is just incredible,” the founder and artistic director of Shakespeare & Company, Tina Packer, said.

The facility will allow Shakespeare & Company to mount additional productions (this season there are six), and will give it, for the first time, adequate — that is, not improvised—space to rehearse, sew costumes, and paint sets.

“It’s going to take the stress out, and hopefully the energy that we put into that stress is now going to be put into even deeper exchange for the artists,” Ms. Packer, a Royal Shakespeare Company veteran who became an American citizen last month said.

Expanding training programs for actors, scholars, and educators is a key part of the vision for the new facility, which includes the opportunity for the different segments to interact with one another. Knowledge they may exchange includes sword-fighting techniques, teaching Shakespeare to 8-year-olds, and using the Bard to help juvenile delinquents.

“The company adheres to those basic Elizabethan principals of the actor-audience relationship and observing the verse. We are also a teaching company. We’d love to teach the people in other Shakespeare companies, and they have things to teach us, too,” Ms. Packer said.

Increased revenues from the workshops and from ticket sales in the new theater will help stabilize the finances of the company, which has an annual budget of $5 million.

“The truth is that our small productions are economically more viable for us, because the scenery and lighting is much simpler,” Ms. Packer said.

The new theater will begin with three new productions in the shoulder season.

“You can’t be a truly faithful Shakespeare company unless you’re a new works company,” Ms. Packer said. “We’re not just about replicating the old. We’re really trying to make the argument to live in language.”

At the gala, which included fireworksandabriefhistoryofthecompany delivered by four actors who have played Puck there — including Ms. Packer’s son, Jason Asprey — patrons expressed confidence in the future.

“Shakespeare & Co. has changed my life completely. It’s shown me humanity and what poetry can do for society,” a 15-year-old student in the summer training program of Shakespeare & Company, Shea Kelly of Pittsfield, Mass., said.

“This is the place for lively and imaginative theater,” a former volunteer with Carnegie Hill Neighbors, Mikel Witte, said.

By New York standards, the project is modest.

“A $5 million construction project in Queens is nothing. But up here it’s a huge thing, when you’re going to improve a property of this size,” the Brooklyn-bred chief financial officer at Shakespeare & Company, Nicholas Puma, who is overseeing the project, said.

Work has already begun with the removal of debris and a 17,000-gallon underground oil tank. Mr. Puma expects work on the interior to begin in November, with the project completed in Spring 2008.

The chairman of the company’s board, Boston-based businessman Michael Miller, received credit for bringing the company to this next level. Since he became chairman nine years ago, he has helped the company obtain its own campus after nearly 20 years of working at Edith Wharton’s estate, the Mount. He also helped bring in professional managers to work alongside the artist managers, including executive director Mark Jones and Mr. Puma. Now his sights are on making the new facility work for the company.

The campus, once used as a school and by a group called Bible Speaks, is a motley assortment of circa-1960s buildings, many of which are unusable.

“It’s been seen as an albatross by previous owners,” a vice-chairman of the board, Richard Mescon, a retired lawyer from Manhattan, said.

There is some derelict charm in some of the peeled paint and collapsed roofs, but façade of the building set to be turned into the Center for Production and Performing Arts will be punched up with windows, multi-colored banners, and the grounds will receive extensive landscaping, including a wetland garden.

“It’s going to be much more festive, and much more arts-oriented in the decorative details,” Mr. Puma said.

The company finished banking the cost of the estimated $5 million renovation a few days before the gala, when Mr. Miller and Ms. Packer — who was pulled from preparing to play Cleopatra in this summer’s “Antony and Cleopatra” — sat down at a picnic table with a donor and secured a $750,000 donation.

By the end of 2009, the company aims to raise an additional $2.5 million for working capital, starting an endowment, program expenses, and its urgent deferred-maintenance projects. “Getting this infrastructure, it may not be all that sexy compared to an actual replica of an Elizabethan theater, but you have to have it in place first,” Mr. Mescon said. “The building of the Rose is the finish line for developing our campus and it will be a large-scale, international effort.”

agordon@nysun.com