“This green plot shall be our stage,” the mechanical Peter Quince declares at the very top of Act 3 in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In Garrison, New York, architect Jeanne Gang and Studio Gang take that idea almost literally, designing a new permanent home for Hudson Valley Shakespeare that keeps the company’s long-standing open-air tradition closely tied to the surrounding landscape.
Recently completed, the new 26,000-square-foot theater seats 451 people and emphasizes drama, setting, and the joys of Elizabethan theater through its design, positioning it against the surrounding natural landscape and using the environment as a component in performance.
Built on a former golf course, Studio Gang’s structure sits at the intersection of sustainability, community and art. What was once a fairway with high water demand is being reimagined as a cultural and ecological landscape with native grasses, restored wetlands, rainwater capture and reuse and other strategies that support the project’s LEED Platinum ambitions. For decades, past productions put on by HVS were performed in an open-air tent in the historic Boscobel House and Gardens, and the new summer stage preserves this distinctive format that is central to the troupe’s identity.
With exposed timber support columns and a breezy seating pavilion, the theater expands on the spatial intimacy associated with Shakespearean performance without turning itself into a historical replica. Its open structure references other iconic Shakespearean venues throughout history, beginning with the Globe Theater in London, while modernizing that lineage through contemporary architecture, accessibility, and environmental performance.
The broader site is designed as more than a place to arrive, watch and leave. Through restoring native grasses and wetlands, what was once a golf course becomes not only a center stage for art and culture but also an environmentally revitalized, community-centered space where theatergoers and guests are invited to sit and stay awhile.
Expanded accessibility options open up the space to a wider, more diverse audience. Picnicking on the hills and strolling the property before each show is encouraged, offering patrons and locals access to views of sprawling hills and the flowing Hudson River. Once inside, those same views are carefully and precisely framed by the theater’s proscenium arch, allowing the real Hudson Valley landscape to become part of the world on stage, whether the evening calls for the Forest of Arden in As You Like It, or the enchanted woods in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
There is an inherent symbiotic relationship between the design of the theater and the mission of HVS, which highlights both its role as a performance space utilized for entertainment, pleasure and shared experience, and as a venue that exists to “foster meaningful human connections at the convergence of nature and culture.”
Photography by Jason O’Rear.
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