Director Shirley Jo Finney is running the cast of “Alice” through its paces the week after Thanksgiving, among big, colorful blocks of letters spelling out the title of the play in a small rehearsal room at the Kennedy Center, when she’s asked about the newest addition to the center’s performance space.
“We can’t wait,” she says. “It’s going to be great. It’s a terrific space.”
“It” is the new Family Theater, a 324-seat, state-of-the-art permanent home theater where the Kennedy Center will showcase its programming for young people and families.
Under construction and renovation more than 11 months, the new theater — the Kennedy Center’s sixth performing-arts space — cost $9 million and is part of the center’s $125 million commitment to performing-arts education.
“Alice” was picked to inaugurate the new Kennedy Center Family Theater. All the production participants knew it would be helter-skelter time come opening day for this urban coming-of-age-tale. The company held its first full dress rehearsal on Friday and officially opened the theater with a performance that night.
This also marks the 30th anniversary of the Kennedy Center’s Imagination Celebration, the performance series for young audiences that will call the Family Theater home. The Kennedy Center has created, produced or commissioned nearly 100 productions for the Imagination Celebration series since the series began.
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The opening of the Family Theater was something of a coming-out party for the Kennedy Center’s education arm and its programming.
Probably no cultural institution in Washington stages more performing-arts fare for the whole family than the Kennedy Center. However, because the plays and events — incubated, rehearsed and produced throughout the Kennedy Center’s various spaces, including the Terrace Theater, the Theater Lab and the Millennium Stage — have been performed without the banner of a home theater, they have never received the kind of focused attention from the public and the press that they might otherwise have enjoyed.
That’s all changed with the presence of the Family Theater, a showcase facility keyed to the presence of young people that still retains most of the formality of a real theater space.
“This has always been a pet project of mine,” Kennedy Center President Michael Kaiser says. “It reflects the center’s and my commitment to young people and their families. It makes our efforts more visible. It offers us ways to introduce young people to the magic of theater.”
Darrell Ayers, vice president of education at the Kennedy Center, says the center has done an enormous amount of family and young people’s theatrical productions over the years.
“But this,” he says, referring to the Family Theater, “has been a dream of ours. We’ve never had a specific place that says, ’That’s our family theater, our venue.’ And it’s the kind of place that allows you to do a lot of things and use it in other ways.”
It’s for young people, yet it’s very accessible to everyone.
“Accessibility is a key to this,” he says. “It’s not a playground. It’s not set up like a rumpus room. It’s meant to give young people a real experience — and hopefully the habit — of going to the theater.”
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Here’s what that means in statistical, fact-sheet terms. The new Kennedy Center Family Theater has 14,000 square feet. It has 324 comfortable seats with cushions covered in a multicolor fabric called Firecracker. It has a tiered layout. It includes two elevators for access and a spacious lobby. It has comfortable, accessible seating for up to 25 wheelchair users. It contains four dressing rooms, including two underneath the stage.
It is state-of-the-art, high-end, with a rigging system controlled by a computer in the stage wing. It has a high-tech, up-to-the-minute infrastructure for lights, audio, video and data that includes a capability for Internet broadcasting, television, audio recording and interactive programming. It has a computerized dimming system with a wireless remote control.
Other tech equipment includes Crown amplifiers, a Yamaha mixing console, an infrared listening system for hearing-impaired patrons, and high-end JBL speakers. A permanently installed video projection system will allow for sophisticated programming and alternative uses, including PowerPoint presentations and DVD playback, useful tools for special groups and educational presentations.
Sachs Morgan Studio of New York, which did the renovations for the Kennedy Center’s Opera House and Concert Hall, also oversaw the theater and lighting in the new space. Most of the rest of the project work was done by area companies.
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Before it became the Kennedy Center’s Family Theater, the space for years was used by the American Film Institute to screen film programs. AFI has since moved its operations to Silver Spring. In recent years, the space was used by temporarily homeless theaters such as the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company.
Just before Thanksgiving, workers, overseers and technicians were still putting the finishing touches on the theater, but already you could see certain aspects that make the theater family-friendly and uniquely suited to young people’s theater.
“You can see the partition here in the middle. It’s similar to what’s been done at the Opera House and the Concert Hall,” project manager Barbara Gartley says.
“There’s a lot of room on the sides. It’s a spacious place and there’s room for actors to come into the audience and interact and, conversely, it’s easy to bring audience members onto the stage. It expands the playing field, so to speak. Performers can come in from other places than just the traditional wing entrance. So at the level of a theater for young people, there are a lot of opportunities for interaction.”
Mr. Ayers calls that “breaking down the fourth wall,” the invisible partition between stage and house. “We want to engage the kids a little, so there’s more interaction and a possibility of theatrical adventure,” he says. “You won’t see that at the Opera House.”
It is by all measures a real-live theater, and its uses will give it its identity, just as the name itself will.
For Mr. Kaiser, it’s not just part of a wish list, but also a wish fulfillment.
“The first show I ever saw was ’The Music Man’ with Barbara Cook,” he says. “It was magic for me. … We want kids, young people, to be hooked on theater. We want to create a generation of theatergoers. …We intend for this to be a place for all the performance arts.”
Those wide aisles on each side and the break in the seats in the middle will give everyone easier access and will allow for the showcasing of high-energy, interactive theater.
“When the opportunity presented itself to create a space like this, we knew we had to be smart about how to go about it,” Mr. Kaiser says. “To have a real, permanent theater meant you could create and produce on a consistent level.”
“We always wanted our own theater, but for the longest time, there was no space,” Mr. Ayers says, “and I think that’s important. Young people today have so many options — the Internet, computer games, movies, television, cable, IPods, phones with videos — they’re easily distracted. The idea of a permanent theater space is to build a permanent audience.”
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The yearly Imagination Celebration programs — including the tours it has run for 13 seasons of plays originated or commissioned by the Kennedy Center — amount to a body of performance and theater works for young people.
The results have been widely acclaimed but — partly because of the absence of a theater like the Family Theater — have been less noticed than they should have been. The productions seemed to be part of something separate from the center’s more noticeable performing fare, such as the National Symphony Orchestra, the Washington National Opera, the Kirov Ballet and the Royal Shakespeare Company.
That’s not the case, of course. “In some ways, there’s nothing more important that we do here than what goes on in the education department,” Mr. Kaiser says.
Since 1977, nearly 100 productions have been presented or originated as part of the Imagination Celebration season, beginning with a version of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” Among those contributing to its productions are choreographer Debbie Allen (“Pepito’s Story”), playwright Ken Ludwig (“The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”), singer Carly Simon (the opera “Romulus Hunt”), and writer Judith Viorst (“Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day”).
Young people can see themselves in the Imagination Celebration productions in ways that will inspire them to see more adult theater fare. It isn’t just the aisles that will be accessible in the new Family Theater. The plays and shows themselves will be as well.
“Look what we’re doing this year,” Mr. Ayers says. “Hip-hop, urban tales, the first cooperative work with an Arab country, a play about the experiences of a Japanese-American teen during World War II.”
Four works commissioned by the Kennedy Center for the Imagination Celebration season are on the menu this year, including “Walking the Winds: Arabian Tales,” which was produced in collaboration with the Arts Center of Amman, Jordan.
There’s also “Citizen 13559: The Journal of Ben Uchida,” and “Brave No World: Identity. Community. Stand-Up Comedy.”
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And then there’s “Alice.”
Whoopi Goldberg wrote the book. Minneapolis playwright Kim Hines, who adapted “My Lord What a Morning: The Marian Anderson Story” for the Imagination Celebration, adapted it. Shirley Jo Finney directed it.
“It’s not really ’Alice in Wonderland,’ even if there is a rabbit in it. And anyway, he’s half-invisible,” says Ms. Finney, who has worked at major regional theaters across the country.
“It’s a story about a suburban girl who wins a lottery ticket and decides to go to the big city to cash it in. It’s a coming-of-age story. It’s about what she has to learn — which is that money, popularity, material things and looks, the bling, bling, aren’t everything. It’s a fun, scary, exciting trip, let me tell you.”
The big blocks of letters, which are a colorful, graffitilike prop and set, convey something about the attitude of the show: It’s “now,” contemporary, urban and full of surprises, as multifunctional as a telephone that plays music and hooks up to the Internet.
“That is going to look so cool onstage,” Ms. Finney says of the production. And Alice (Audra Alise Polk), her rich-and-deep-voiced friends Sal de Rabbit (James Konicek) and Robin (Nehal Joshi) prepared for a few minutes to set out for the city.
It may be a little bit of “Alice in Downtownland.” Or a touch of the urban Emerald City.
What it will be is the perfect opener for the Kennedy Center’s new Family Theater.
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