Carolyn Jack

Editor and CEO, Geniocity.com
A project of The Genius Group LLC

Creative Nerve: Thinking Big

I got a chance Saturday to tour an amazing project that may turn out to be the envy of regional theaters and major cities across America.

With a small group of other people, I slapped on a hardhat and stepped through a downtown Cleveland doorway into the enormous, three-dimensional grid of scaffolding that’s currently holding up the old Hanna Theatre. Through a haze of dust, we all saw the glint of rich decorations on ceiling and walls, the elegant curve of proscenium arch, the sweep of space that even the endless metal forest of supports couldn’t diminish.

One of the five historic theaters in Cleveland’s Playhouse Square, the Hanna is already a beautiful and significant landmark. But that wasn’t the cool part.

The cool part is that the Great Lakes Theater Festival, which will be the Hanna’s resident company, hasn’t chosen to just restore the Hanna. GLTF is making it bionic, a Faberge egg with the technological future incubating in its golden shell.  

When it’s done, the Hanna will have the only completely adaptable thrust stage in Cleveland and maybe the only one of this kind in the country. Designed to move up and down in three separate pieces, the thrust can be set up as a peninsula attached level to the mainstage or lower; configured as a round; or dropped out of sight in the pit for shows that demand a traditional proscenium setting.  And, of course, the whole place is being fitted out for computer operations.

But what’s more, GLTF has had the Hanna designed for a new kind of social theater experience, adapting the art form to contemporary tastes by adding a wide bar, rails and lounge area at the rear of the main floor, where patrons can watch a production with drink in hand and stay after the final curtain to discuss the play over a nightcap before heading home. Standard seating down front and in the small balcony boxes bring audiences close to the stage action; a social room next to the lobby offers a party or meeting space. And the open design of the entire house lets people move around unimpeded, able to see whatever is happening onstage.

The whole thing is a different concept – a fresh way to see and enjoy theater, one that might have significant consequences for an art form struggling hard to revive the public’s interest in what it offers. The design also permits all this change to occur without compromising the theater’s historic structure and ornamentation at all: Generations to come can address their own tastes by easily removing what GLTF has put in.

The Great Lakes company has been thinking big about the future and, frankly, so was I as I peered over edges and around corners at the construction of what amounts to a huge “Yes!” to change.

It’s not simply that it was thrilling to find somebody in Cleveland daring to be bold - what actually stunned me a little was the thought that my company and I might someday have roles to play in projects of this kind. It takes a lot of public, private and corporate support to get theaters – and art museums and concert halls and hospitals and libraries - built. A city needs all its imaginative citizens to plan and carry out its future.

And being a creative entrepreneur means that I and others like me, who have never had the chance to turn our own hands to big civic tasks, might actually have something to offer. Ideas. Time and effort. Leadership.  Maybe even some real money someday.  

Every day, I’m trying to change the world in a good way with Geniocity.com and I’m struggling impatiently with the micron-by-micron pace that work requires. But for that hour or two in the Hanna, I caught a glimpse of the effect that people of enterprise can have on their communities and it made me see myself differently. Not just an outside observer anymore – someone who could, and should, lend a hand.