For 20 years, Impact Theatre has been producing youth-oriented new plays and fast-paced Shakespeare productions in the basement of La Val’s Pizza in North Berkeley. It’s been the place to see plays about “Dungeons and Dragons,” cockfighting, pop idols, superheroes, serial killers and sea monsters. But artistic director Melissa Hillman and managing director Cheshire Isaacs now say the current season will be the company’s last, at least in its current format.

“We’re going to finish out our 20th season with Melissa’s Looney Tunes-inspired ‘Comedy of Errors’ in February/March, followed — probably in May/June — by a movie-live theater hybrid of ‘Plan 9 from Outer Space’ by the same people who did ‘Splathouse,’ a double feature a couple of summers ago,” Isaacs says. “Then we expect to vacate La Val’s by the end of June.”

The reasons are all too familiar: Grants are harder and harder to come by. Ticket sales are down, even for shows with great reviews. The tiny staff is spread far too thin. What’s more, Impact suddenly lost the rights to the play originally planned for November/December, and inquiries about a hoped-for replacement dragged on so long that there was no time to fill the slot.

“We’re stuck in a weird financial place because most grants require you to have an annual budget of $100,000 or more,” Hillman says. “And we can’t make enough in ticket sales to grow. All that money to grow comes from grants and donations, and when we’re doing new plays by emerging playwrights in a basement with pizza and beer, our audience always skews really young, and those people just don’t have a lot of money. That was the audience we wanted, that was the audience we went for, and that was part of the whole point of keeping ticket prices accessible.”

This isn’t the end for Impact. No longer producing seasons of plays, Isaacs says, “We will be gearing up to launch Impact 2.0. What that is has yet to be fully worked out, but Melissa and I still feel Impact’s mission of giving much-needed early professional experiences to up-and-coming artists is something unique in the Bay Area. We think we can further that mission by transforming Impact into a resource for other Bay Area theater companies, promoting actors, directors, playwrights and designers we think companies should know about.”

Impact has long been the place to discover the theater artists of tomorrow, who go on to hit larger and larger stages in the Bay Area and beyond. Reggie White, an actor that Hillman discovered in her class at Cal State East Bay, is starring off-Broadway in a play by Lauren Gunderson, another Impact veteran. Director Desdemona Chiang, who staged her first show at Impact, now is working at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Impact introduced the Bay Area to playwrights such as Steve Yockey, Sheila Callaghan and Lauren Yee, who were soon snapped up by larger theaters.

Perhaps most crucially, the company may continue to produce plays on a much less frequent basis. “We’ve talked about bringing Impact-style Shakespeare to larger companies, or to partner with a company with a new playwright,” Hillman says. “We’re discussing what future Impact productions would look like. You can take much bigger risks when you’re doing a one-off show than when you’re doing an entire season and you have to support rent on your space.”

The vital role that Impact plays in the Bay Area theater ecosystem — a hub for new voices, new faces and exciting new work — will be missed. At the same time, it’s remarkable that it’s already been around for two decades as a boisterous troupe putting on plays in a pizza parlor basement.

“We started Impact in 1996 around a table at Au Coquelet,” Hillman says, referring to the Berkeley cafe. “We were trying to fill an unmet need for theater that really was for and about younger people — people under 40. That audience was just not represented in the theater, so we just did it. We just started catering to this audience.”

Josh Costello was the founding artistic director, and Hillman served as associate artistic director and literary manager. Costello is now the literary manager at Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre Company and an acclaimed director whose hit San Francisco Playhouse production of Aaron Loeb’s “Ideation” opens off-Broadway in March. When Costello went off to get his MFA in 2000, Hillman took over as artistic director.

“This was my labor of love,” she says. “I never drew a salary at Impact. Twenty years is a long time to be putting so much time into something while I’m also working to pay my own rent. It was a gradual process of realizing that at a certain turning point, we’re either going to go gangbusters and grow and make this our job …” The rest of the sentence goes unsaid: or decide it’s time to move on.

“It’s been an incredible experience,” Hillman says. “When I look back on it, the things that are the most important to me are the moments when I felt like I was of greatest service, helping people start their careers, helping people get seen, and doing plays that other people wouldn’t do or couldn’t do or hadn’t thought to do. I always say if I had a coat of arms, it would be a pair of hands giving someone a boost up.”