For the first two seasons at Hudson Stage Company, co-founders Dan Foster, Olivia Sklar and Denise Bessette might have taken the meteorological conditions as an omen.
“It seemed that every event we did was met with some weather disaster: a flood, a hurricane, several blizzards, and even a late spring hailstorm,” recalls Foster. “But being in the theater, we took them all as positive signs.”
The skies have long since cleared over Hudson Stage, which began as an informal play-reading series in the Croton Free Library and, 10 years ago, formed as a professional theater company at Clear View School in Briarcliff.
Last year, they had to turn people away from the sold-out run of Jeffrey Hatcher’s“Murderers” at the 130-seat Woodward Hall Theater at Pace University in Briarcliff.

That kind of flood is another positive sign for the three friends, each of whom maintains professional lives in the theater: Foster is an in-demand director; Bessette and Sklar are working actresses.
By design, the fall and spring mainstage productions dovetail  with their professional and personal lives, Foster says.
“We’ve made this company and told ourselves that we are also going to keep our lives,” Foster says. “Denise acts and Olivia is a recurring character on ‘One Life to Live.’ I think we’re right where we want to be, given the parameters we’ve set.”
“We want to try to have balanced lives,” he says. “It means that during this one little period leading up to the show, our families eat a lot of pizza.”
Foster says the company’s latest production, opening tomorrow for a three-weekend run, is just the kind of show he and his co-founders set out to produce a decade ago.
“Mary’s Wedding” is a two-character play by Canadian writer Stephen Massicote that mixes dreams and reality, love and loss, life and death. It stars Christina Bennett Lind and Blake Kubena.
Set in World War I, it is steeped in poetic language, and requires an audience to think, to make connections, to fill in the blanks.
“It feels cinematic, but there’s an inherent theatricality to it that is part of the experience,” says Foster, who directs the play. “If it were a film, there’d be nothing for the audience to do, nothing for them to fill in.
Hudson Stage audiences can handle it, says Foster, who directs many of the shows while Sklar and Bessette act as producers.
“We learned that audiences are smart and that we had to court them,” he says. “They weren’t naturally going to come to us. But once word got out, we became a legitimate choice for them.
“We’re not going to compete with ‘Wicked,’ but to see a good play with really good actors that challenges them and doesn’t necessarily try to appeal to the masses, audiences began to choose us.”
Hudson Stage is trying something new this fall, with Sleepy Hollow playwright Staci Swedeen presenting her monologue “Pardon Me for Living” — about a run-in with a rabid raccoon — on the next three Sundays, at 7 p.m. It is directed by Yvonne Conybeare.
Meanwhile, on the mainstage, Foster says he likes the distance that “Mary’s Wedding” offers as a historical piece and the universality it offers as a romance.
“The whole historical element appeals to me because there’s a charm, a beauty that happens in a historical play. It may have the same themes and the same emotions as a contemporary play, but as an audience member, you go and figure, ‘Oh, this is historical. It isn’t about me.’
“But if it’s done well, before you know it, it is about you. That sneaking-up quality is exciting. I love that trick that it plays.”

After 10 years, Dan Foster has plenty of Hudson Stage memories.

“One moment I’ll always remember — because it wasn’t in the play. On opening night of ‘Murderers,’ which was a landmark production for us, the three  characters appeared at the beginning and gave each other a devilish, conspiratorial grin, and the audience erupted in laughter.

“I realized that we had created something special and unexpected. That’s what you hope for all the time: to take a script and take it to that next level.
“It doesn’t happen all the time, but when it does, your heart does a little leap.”
“I got this rush that we created something that wasn’t in the play. We created a world, a community, that brought the audience in.”

Another memory involves a play Foster didn’t direct.

“Between scenes of the wacky David Lindsay-Abaire comedy ‘Kimberly Akimbo,’ director Richard Caliban  had each actor behind a scrim dancing in character with total abandon, the kind of dancing we all do in a shower when no one is looking. I thought it was an inspired idea totally in the spirit of the play.

How did Foster find “Mary’s Wedding?”
We had done a British plays. We had done American plays and  a friend of mine asked, ‘Have you checked any Canadian playwrights?’
“So I Googled ‘Canadian playwrights’ and this play came up.
“I thought ‘Even if Olivia and Denise don’t want to do this, this appeals to me as an artist,’” he says.

Hudson Stage
At Woodward Hall Theatre
Pace University, 235 Elm Road,
Briarcliff Manor. 914-271-2811.
hudsonstage.com
“Mary’s Wedding”
By Stephen Massicote
Directed by Dan Foster
Oct. 31-Nov. 15.
Fridays (Tonight, Nov. 7 and 14) at 8; Saturdays (Nov. 1, 8 and 15) at 8; Sundays (Nov. 2 and 9) at 3; extra matinee Nov. 15 at 3 p.m.
Tickets: $30, $25 for students and seniors. General admission.
“Pardon Me for Living”
By Staci Swedeen
Directed by Yvonne Conybeare
Three Sundays (Nov. 2, 9 and 16) at 7.
Tickets: $20, general admission.