Over the years, OSF actors have had to practice grands jetés on unforgiving hardwood floors, run lines in too-small, dimly lit rooms and rove among a half-dozen spaces—even rehearsing in the lobby of the Bowmer.
“The old rehearsal rooms were so inadequately sized that they couldn't even fit the entire group of artists working on a play, including understudies and run crew members, to watch a run-through of a show,” says Artistic Director Bill Rauch.
The new Hay-Patton Rehearsal Center—dedicated to beloved OSF leaders Richard Hay and Bill Patton—has changed all that. The renovation of the dingy and crammed-full Production Building into the new Rehearsal Center has produced a facility that rivals that of any theatre in the country. Its 28,000 square feet contains six rehearsal spaces (three large, one medium, two small); music practice rooms; two large, sun-drenched Green Rooms; zoned heating and cooling; elevators; washer-dryers, showers and much more. And all designed with the practicality, efficiency, elegance and warmth embodied by the facility's two namesakes.
The building’s many incarnations
The two-story reinforced concrete structure was originally erected in 1925 as an auto-storage garage for the patrons of the new Lithia Springs Hotel, across the steeply angled First Street. The building was later used as a car-repair shop, Ole’s Radiator and Repair Shop, a motorcycle company, a roller-skating rink and a recreation center that provided bowling, billiards and a soda fountain. In the 1970s and early 1980s, it housed the Oregon College of the Arts. OSF bought the building in 1984, and a year later opened it as the Production Building that housed the Scene Shop, Paint Shop, Prop Shop, Physical Plant shops and offices and Automation crew. The bottom floor contained almost 5,000 hand props and was jammed with shelves of paint cans. The top floor was used to build sets, but had long outgrown that space.
Building the New Theatre in 2002 brought more sets, props and workers to the Production Building. OSF’s 2005–2006 space-planning study revealed the urgent need for changes. “In that process, we recognized that our . . . Production Building was inadequate, and we desperately needed to do something about that,” says Executive Director Emeritus Paul Nicholson, who oversaw the design, development and construction of the Rehearsal Center. “When we decided on that, we initially said, if we move that [building function] somewhere else . . . we would be able to sell the current Production Building and use the funds to build a new one.” However, now-deceased Director of Development Peter Thomas advised Festival leadership to never sell any land or buildings already owned; in Ashland, both resources would always be in short supply.
OSF decided to keep the building and renovate it. But first, a new Production Building had to be constructed. It was completed in 2014 in the neighboring town of Talent (Please see Prologue article about the building.). Long before design started on the new production building, Nicholson, General Manager Ted DeLong and Associate Artistic Director Christopher Acebo were already thinking about other uses for the old building. Between rehearsals and Education’s many student workshops, there was growing competition for OSF’s few large spaces. It became clear that if the new building could be dedicated for rehearsals, it would free up the existing rehearsal halls for Education and other uses.
The namesakes and the funders
The building, called HPRC for short, is named after two OSF employees who have had a major impact on the Company. Bill Patton started in the 1940s as a lighting technician and was OSF’s first general manager and then executive director until his retirement in 1995. He died in 2011. Richard L. Hay had been Patton’s roommate at Stanford University and Patton persuaded him to come to OSF in 1950 to be a lighting assistant. Hay became a scenic designer who, over the course of 59 seasons, provided design expertise for all the OSF theatres as well as set designs for 245 productions, including this year’s The Winter’s Tale.
A visionary OSF Board member (who has remained anonymous) saw the need to fund the Rehearsal Center and, at the same time, to find a way to honor Peter Thomas, who had recently passed away. She assembled a group of three funders, The Goatie Foundation, Roberta and David Elliott, and Helen and Peter Bing, who together gave OSF an extraordinary gift of $4,500,000. The gift not only allowed the Festival to rename the New Theatre the Thomas Theatre in 2013, but also replenished the Artistic Opportunities Fund. Because the theatre had been completely funded when it was built, the three patrons asked that their gifts be directed toward the HPRC. They offered to match funds given by the Festival’s Board of Directors and a handful of other generous donors, and with that inspiration, the funding for the HPRC was achieved.
A list of all of those whose generosity brought the HPRC into being is hanging inside the door of the building (and can be seen here). In honor of significant gifts, the three largest rehearsal rooms are named for Charlotte Lin and Robert P. Porter, Shawn Buending, and Muriel and Marvin Goldman.
The original back-of-an-envelope cost estimate for the project was $3 million, says Nicholson. The total price, including design, soft costs like architect and contractor fees, permit costs and an allowance for furniture and fittings, came to $4.3 million. “And the last time I looked,” he says, “we finished within about $7,000 of our total.”
Executing the dream
Like everything at OSF, the design process was a collaborative one, with input sought from so many sectors of the company who would be using the space. Nicholson estimates that between 70 and 100 OSF staffers from the artistic, marketing and development departments as well as actors, stage managers and directors were involved in the planning.
One might think that this amount of input from many sectors of a company might be off-putting to a design firm. David Wilkerson, the lead design architect at ORW Architecture, which designed the renovation, says it wasn’t. “It was always a pleasure to work with the project stakeholders.The fact that they are creative people with a keen visual and aesthetic sense made it even more rewarding, as we generally had the same outlook about matters of design.”
Wilkerson says the project presented several hurdles. “The site was definitely a challenge in that the building occupied almost the entire site,” which hampered storing and staging materials. “But an even bigger challenge was the low headroom on the building’s first floor, which was much less than what was needed for a proper rehearsal space. We recommended raising the structure of the second floor in order to create the vertical space that was required for the rooms underneath. This allowed us to stay within the building envelope, and took advantage of excess space above the second floor. Since it was also a more economical approach, it provided a way for us to accommodate the rest of OSF’s wish list for this project.”
Adroit Construction began demolition in November 2014 and completed construction in October 2015. Adroit used more than 40 subcontractors and suppliers to complete the work, and between 15 and 30 people worked daily on the site, says project manager David Ross. They demolished the whole interior of the building as well as the roof, which Ross says “allowed for structural upgrades to the new structure from the ground up, from new footings in the slab to the new roof system to accommodate the needs of the new space. Performing structural upgrades allowed for three floor levels, thereby maximizing the available square footage to best fit the needs of OSF.” That third story now houses actor support, such as voice and text staff.
“Given that the construction/design team was trying to maximize the usable square footage inside the existing walls, the space became very tight with the various utilities required,” says Ross. “For example, there are no ceiling attics or crawlspaces to accommodate utilities, specifically HVAC ducting. This forced a large amount of the ducting that keeps the various spaces inside the building climate-controlled to be exposed, not necessarily ideal, but it worked.”
Three-foot-wide metal heating and cooling ducts were installed across the ceilings.That presented a problem: Air running through ducts can make loud whistling or tinny noises—not very conducive to actors trying to listen to their directors or working on lines. So, guided by acoustician Bill Dohn, Adroit moved ducts in some cases and beefed up the soundproofing in others, adding sheetrock and acoustic tiles to make sure the sound didn’t bleed between rooms.
Ted DeLong became general manager of OSF three years ago and worked alongside Nicholson during the design and construction phase of the project. On a tour, he explained various features of the new building. In one of the large rehearsal rooms, 1-A—which most recently housed The River Bride rehearsals but can handle shows from any of the theatres—he pointed out some tracking in the ceiling. “This is a product called Unistrut that’s used in theatres for rigging. It goes right into the joists and can hold a 350-pound live load. You can suspend props, scenery and people from it. Before, we had a whole run of shows that had props and scenic elements hanging overhead and we could never find a place to rehearse them because you couldn’t rig anything in any of the rehearsal rooms we had at the time.”
In a corner of that room are four floor-to-ceiling glass panels that fold like closet doors; they’re extra large to facilitate the loading of props and scenery. Properties Manager Jim Clark was involved in the process early on. “As soon as the architects started producing drawings of the room, I started asking questions,” he says. “I wanted higher doors with taller openings and bigger elevators to move large props between floors. The looping booth/Malvolio’s cage from Twelfth Night is eight feet tall. Even with that loading door, it had to be turned on its side.” But in some cases, compromise was necessary: The size of the doors had to come down slightly to decrease cost and make them less noisy.
Actors’ perspective
Actor Rodney Gardiner, who plays Feste in Twelfth Night, remembers the old rehearsal rooms. “I recall rehearsing Head Over Heels in the old rehearsal studios with their hard floors and lack of dance mirrors. It was a show for which the ensemble rehearsed very physical dance routines incessantly. I was sobered by the alarming number of injuries we saw in that rehearsal process.”
The new Equity-approved floors in the HPRC are built like gym floors and include flexible pads that provide “bounce” to make them comfortable for dancing, swordfights and fast movement. “Rehearsing the very percussive art of tap dance in the new hall for Twelfth Night was a pleasure,” Gardiner says. “We saw minimal injuries. Mirrors helped immensely with learning the spacing in dance sequences. It's an upgrade in every way.”
Darrell Bluhm, who teaches the Feldenkrais movement method to help actors minimize pain and discomfort, agrees: “A sprung floor means fewer injuries.” He adds another benefit to the new space: the two Green Rooms that have bistro tables and chairs, a microwave and a vending machine: “Actors working on different shows now get to mingle. Before they were all separate. It’s good for new actors to feel included in the Company.”
The stage managers are happy with the new space as well. “Before, our offices were near the theatres but we had to walk to all the various rehearsal spaces,” says Jeremy Eisen. “Now we’re next to the rehearsal spaces and we have all of our supplies.” Plus, he says, for people used to always working in windowless spaces, having a bank of windows with views of the foothills makes them feel less like “moles.”
Each rehearsal hall has several large, mobile storage containers with sliding doors, hanging bars and shelves that can be filled with props, stage manager supplies and rehearsal costumes. These can be rolled around as people set up in various parts of the rooms.
The smaller rooms for dance rehearsals can, with a swish of a thick, sound-muffling velour curtain across the mirrors, be transformed into a space for singing rehearsals. And the floors of the rehearsal rooms can be taped off in the exact measurements of the stages and scenery the actors will perform on, creating continuity in their blocking, or movement.
At the building dedication in late February, actor Vilma Silva compared working in the old rehearsal halls to her family’s Christmases—many people in small spaces having to eat with plates on their laps. They made it work, she said, because they were family.
“The Hay-Patton Rehearsal Center is a beautiful facility,” she says. “It is bright, spacious and versatile. But what I most appreciate about it is that we are all there working on the plays, sharing that energy and crossing paths. We are a company.”