On a recent Thursday night, Spanish accents from Colombia, Guatemala and Spain filled the air as dancers swept across the stage of the Thalia Spanish Theatre in Sunnyside, Queens. They were rehearsing the theater’s newest play, “Afrocolombia,” a musical that celebrates Colombia’s African roots through folkloric song and dance.

The next week, tango was center stage as a Colombian-Argentine couple taught a handful of Sunnyside residents the techniques needed to dance milongas, a type of freestyle dance floor tango.

Founded in 1977 and named after a Greek muse, the Thalia Spanish Theatre on Greenpoint Avenue uses theater to transcend cultural barriers. “Our mission at the theater is to promote and diffuse Hispanic culture from a triple perspective: Latin American, Spanish and U.S. Hispanics,” said the Thalia’s artistic and executive director, Angel Gil Orrios.

Orrios, who is from Zaragoza, Spain, came to the U.S. in 1979 to study Broadway musicals under a grant from the U.S.-Spain Joint Committee for Cultural Affairs. His goal then was to produce Broadway-style musicals in Spanish back in his native country. After three years in New York, he went back to Spain, only to come back a month later to work with now deceased Puerto Rican stage and film actor Raúl Juliá with whom he formed a production company. But after Juliá unexpectedly and rapidly died of cancer, Orrios then began working with Silvia Brito, an actress and director who founded the Thalia Theater. In 2000, he succeeded her as executive director.

Orrios, who was interviewed in Spanish, says Brito wanted the theater to meet what she saw as the neglected cultural needs of the borough’s growing Hispanic community, which today accounts for 30 percent of Sunnyside. “There’s been a 45-year movement for Hispanic theater in New York, and at the time that I began working for the theater, the movement had been around 10 years old,” he said.

The Thalia is part of the larger Alianza de Teatros Latinos en Nueva York (The Alliance for Latino Theaters in New York), which is formed by the nine Hispanic-oriented theaters in New York City: seven in Manhattan, another in the Bronx and the Thalia in Queens. The Thalia is different from the others, Orrios says, because it produces both English and Spanish versions of its plays, which works to help attract non-Hispanics to its shows.

Becoming part of the Alianza is, in part, a survival tactic, said William Lopera, the administrative director, who oversees the non-profit theater’s $500,000 annual budget. “It’s a stronger by numbers thing,” Lopera said.

Lopera said that by banding together, the theaters are able to more effectively push for federal and state funding; their biggest donors are the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Both Lopera and Orrios agree that their greatest challenge is to bring in younger audiences. The theater has a mailing list of 20,000 families, some of who travel from out of state just to go to Thalia to see well-known performers like Raul Jaurena who plays the bandoneon, an instrument similar to an accordion. The theater also provides workshops, like the cinema and television production workshop running this fall; holds recurring dance classes, and produces a yearly, free outdoor festival in Sunnyside to reach younger people.

“What I like about the theater is that it leaves no one behind,” said Yaisuri Salamanca, a professional dancer who is teaching the 10-week tango class along with her husband, Hernan Raygosa, with whom she competes in national tango dance competitions. Salamanca was interviewed in Spanish.

Her current students include Melissa Orlando, a ballet teacher and Sunnyside resident. “Everyone at the theater has been amazing,” she said. “They always try and bring people in who are masters of their craft.”

During the rehearsal for “Afrocolombia,” Fernando Meza, the Mestizo Dance Company’s production director, said he appreciated performing in front of a mixed audience. “When I look up after a show and see a majority Asian audience, I feel very good,” he said in Spanish.

Orrios estimates that the audience is generally about 60 percent Hispanic with the rest coming from Sunnyside’s diverse population. “When I see less of a difference in our audience is when we put on musicals, then the audience is more 50-50 because music transcends language barriers,” he said.

Because the theater is relatively small, Orrios says he can take risks like the recent production of “El Tuerto es Rey” (The One-Eyed Man is King), written by the late Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes. “Up until that point, the book had not even been translated into English,” Orrios said, “and here we developed a play script in both English and Spanish.”

In nearly four decades, Orrios said, the Thalia has produced or co-produced over 120 original shows, some of which have gone on to tour or to be picked up by bigger venues – all at an accessible cost of no more than $40 a ticket.

At this point, Orrios said, the Thalia is an important part of Sunnyside. “The uniqueness of theater is that it’s a direct experience with the person or audience that cannot be replicated by other mediums,” he said, “and one that is needed.”