"[15] In 1960, the company moved into its current complex on Sixth Street, which was designed for them by Chicago architect Harry Weese.

[1] In 1966, Robert Alexander joined the company and created the Living Stage as a social outreach improvisational theater.

[16][17][18] Its production The Great White Hope, which opened at Arena Stage in 1967, was transferred to Broadway with its original cast, including James Earl Jones and Jane Alexander in the lead roles.

[1][19] When Arena Stage reprised the play in 2000 as part of its 50th-anniversary celebration, Mahershala Ali was cast as the male lead.

[22] In 1989, the company received a $1 million grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to train minority actors, directors, designers and administrators, and to produce plays from non-white cultures.

In 1973, they performed Thornton Wilder's Our Town and Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee's Inherit the Wind in the Soviet Union after being encouraged by the U.S. State Department to do so.

[1] In 1980 Arena Stage was the first American theater company to be invited to the Hong Kong Arts Festival.

[14] In the U.S., to promote cultural diversity, Zelda Fichandler included plays from the Soviet Union, Romania, Poland, Hungary, Austria, East and West Germany, France, Switzerland, England, Canada, and Australia in the theater's repertoire.

[2] In 1976, Arena Stage became the first theater outside New York to receive a special Tony Award for theatrical excellence.

[23][24] These have included works by Jacqueline Lawton, Eve Ensler, Rajiv Joseph, Mary Kathryn Nagle, Sarah Ruhl, Lawrence Wright, Eduardo Machado, Aaron Posner, John Strand, Craig Lucas, Kenneth Lin, and Nathan Alan Davis.

[30] In 2021, the company released a three-part commissioned music series called Arena Riffs as part of its reopening.

[36][37] The new building also includes a central lobby, restaurant, and the Catwalk Cafe, and such support spaces as rehearsal rooms, classrooms, production shops, and offices.

[1] The Washingtonian magazine, as part of its 50th anniversary commemoration, identified the Arena Stage's 1967 production of The Great White Hope as one of "50 Moments That Shaped Washington, DC".

[19] The play received a lot of attention, some of it negative, because it featured an interracial relationship between James Earl Jones, then a new actor, and Jane Alexander.