The Spring Green theater famous for performing Shakespearean plays under open skies will start construction next month on a stage designed to bring the classics indoors.

American Players Theatre has raised $2.7 million toward a $4 million goal to build a 200-seat indoor theater, plus a 10,000-square-foot production support building, the theater announced Wednesday. The new facilities will be on APT's 110 hilly woodland acres, just behind and up a small hill from the Bravo Center, home to its administrative offices and current rehearsal space.

"It's a particularly beautiful spot," said producing artistic director David Frank. "It's not one that the public would have seen before."

Expected to open to audiences in fall 2009, the new theater will present small-cast and one-person plays better staged in an intimate space, provide a training ground for young actors and interns, and offer "acoustics that are brilliant," Frank said.

"Because it's informal, we could do Shakespeare in jeans there and it would feel right," he said, adding that other playwrights featured might range from Henrik Ibsen and Eugene O'Neill to Tom Stoppard and "maybe (Tony) Kushner."

The new space will not replace APT's current 1,148-seat outdoor theater or cut into its current five-play repertory season that runs the summer long.

"There's no current, immediate plan to make (the indoor theater) year-round," Frank said. "What we will do is start experimenting with gradually lengthening our shoulder season. The first obvious time is to be performing there in October. It's too cold to be performing up the hill at that time, but it's a gorgeous time to be in Spring Green with the fall colors."

An anonymous matching grant of $500,000 was "instrumental" in helping reach the first $1 million for the project, said Frank, who noted that the new building is not an attempt to lure audiences away from other Madison-area theaters.

"There's a substantial portion of our audience who don't go to any other professional theater except for APT," he said. "If that audience gets into the habit of going indoors as well as outdoors, I think we will add more people to the theater-going pool than we will detract."