Renovated Olney Theatre respects the audience’s role in the show

Theaters are making sure everyone gets their time in the spotlight — even you.

The Olney Theatre Center is gearing up to unveil its completed $37 million renovation project Aug. 9. It encompasses three newly redesigned stages, a renovated production facility and an education center to house camps, classes and meeting spaces, some of which are already being put to use.

Financed by Montgomery County, the state of Maryland and individual donors, the project launched in 2018 before its scope widened in 2020, when the lack of live performances during lockdown gave Olney Theatre leaders time to rethink how they wanted the future of theater to look when life returned to normalcy, said Director of Advancement Dina Goldman, who ran the fundraising program.

These major changes reflect a shift in the way theaters are viewing the audience experience. It’s no longer just about coming to watch a show. It’s about feeling immersed in the world of the production and sometimes even being inserted into a scene.

“When you walk into a traditional proscenium theater with the seats, you’re limited to what you can do creatively,” said Olney Theatre Executive Director Debbie Ellinghaus. “I think the expectations are a little different [here]: bigger on audience, making the audience feel very connected to the action on stage and the story. It’s going to feel a lot more intimate.”

Putting audiences in the center of the action

In a typical experience, an audience walks into a theater and sits in stadium seats facing the same way, toward a proscenium stage with a “picture frame” arch separating them from the performance.

Some theaters are trying to do away with those formalities.

Olney Theatre’s two new indoor theaters — the Mulitz-Gudelsky Theatre Lab, which began hosting shows in 2021 after the first round of renovations, and the Bernard Theatre, which will be the site of the first production of Olney Theatre’s 2026-27 season — are aiming to do the same.

Originally a farmhouse from 1938, the Bernard Theatre got a face-lift decades ago, when it became a traditional theater with sloped seating that could house roughly 470 audience members. Following its recent renovations, it’s now a completely open space, with the option to remove a pool-like cover in the center to reveal a platform that can be raised. Production teams can choose between more traditional staging or formats that place audiences in the round or on three sides of the performance.

This fall’s production of “Some Like It Hot,” the story of two 1930s jazz musicians who disguise themselves as women while on the run from the mob, begins in a nightclub. In lieu of regular theater seating, some audience members will get to purchase seats at cabaret tables, inserting themselves directly into the setting.

“You’re going to feel like you’re walking into a speakeasy,” Ellinghaus said. “It’s going to be fun.”

Olney Theatre plans to replicate this creative thinking throughout next season, including in “Peter and the Starcatchers,” where it will decorate the theater to let audiences feel they’re in Neverland, and “Crowns,” a show about the hats that generations of Black women in the South have worn to church.

“We’re going to literally turn it into a Southern Baptist church,” Ellinghaus said. The team is floating ideas to make the first row of each section an actual church pew.

The Mulitz-Gudelsky Theatre Lab was also part of the Staging the Future Capital Campaign but opened for performances in late 2021. The stage runs from one side of the room to the other, with risers on both sides for audience seating.

And set decoration expands beyond the traditional stage boundaries, immersing audience members in the setting as soon as they walk through the door. Last spring’s production of the Tony-winning play “Appropriate,” about a white family that must come to terms with the role their elders played in upholding racist institutions, put audiences in a rural Southern setting, with vines covering walls and cricket sound effects that carried onto the stage, set to look like the interior of a deteriorating Arkansas plantation house.

“You are next to the actors. They are literally brushing past you as they go through this incredibly emotional story,” Artistic Director Jason Loewith previously told The Banner. In a show such as “Appropriate,” which invited audiences to think critically about their own experiences with racism, facing fellow audience members invited them to share in the social reckoning.

Smaller but mighty local theater

Broadway theaters have a minimum of 500 seats, but many have upward of 1,000. The Kennedy Center’s largest stage seats nearly 2,500.

For local theaters around Maryland, their smaller scale is an invitation to use intimate spaces to their advantage in storytelling.

“They really connect with the actors, and that is what makes for a better experience,” Ellinghaus said.

Shows in which audience members can see one another aren’t new — they’ve been around since ancient times, and there are other spots in Maryland, such as Annapolis’ Colonial Players theater with in-the-round seating and Bethesda’s Round House Theatre, where seating forms a semicircle around the stage.

But Olney Theatre is emphasizing the fact that audience members facing each other can serve a unique storytelling purpose, too.

“With an open canvas like this, a director can come in and reimagine that whole experience,” Ellinghaus said. “It allows us to create immersive experiences, which is the future, or at least the present, of live theater. ... It allows artists to just think bigger and more creatively.”