During the last year, the theme of UVA’s Arts Grounds seems to be “scaling back for the sake of moving forward.” In 2007, the Board of Visitors approved a $118 million Arts Gateway plan that included a new art museum on Emmet Street and a $26 million expansion and renovation of the drama building on Culbreth Road. When UVA opted instead, in 2009, to renovate the art museum’s current home, museum director Bruce Boucher told C-VILLE that, “in the present economic climate, a very ambitious scheme like [the Arts Gateway] would take a long time.”
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UVA’s Thrust Theatre will be tucked into the hill adjacent to the current drama building. Vice Provost for the Arts Elizabeth Hutton Turner says the energy produced from adjacencies at the Casteen Arts Grounds are “just going to be so amazing.” |
Now, plans for the drama building are ready to follow suit. The university recently issued a call for construction managers for UVA’s Thrust Theatre, a 20,500 square-foot addition to current drama facilities, and the first phase of renovations to the drama building. The name stems from the design of the stage, which seats audience members along three sides of the space.
“Hope deferred makes you heartsick,” says Vice Provost of the Arts Elizabeth Hutton Turner. “You need to see hope fulfilled to gather energy, to see what this means for the future.” The theater, according to Turner, is the “baking soda of the Arts Grounds.”
Not to say the addition will bring about an explosive change. Rather, the 300-seat performance space will “be set back into the hillside at the southeast corner of the Drama Building,” according to the project description. It will fit audiences that fall between the range of Helms Theatre (200 seats) and the Culbreth Theatre (600). The current lobby for the drama building will also be expanded, and the largely below-grade theater will include an at-grade rooftop terrace.
Plans for the theater began with a $4 million donation from alumnus Mortimer Caplin and his wife, Ruth, in 2006—years before the Arts Grounds project was renamed for retiring university president John Casteen and his wife, Betsy. Tom Jennings, the Assistant Vice President for Student Programs in the Office of University Development, says the project also got a boost from a $1.5 million anonymous donation and a $1 million matching grant from the Arts Grounds Challenge Fund.
“We were in the midst of trying to raise the full $12.5 million when the notion of honoring [the Casteens] became part of it,” says Jennings. “So the goal became raising the last $6 million to make that addition possible.” Funding opportunities for the project are still available, from $2,500 seat campaign contributions to $2 million for the theater lobby.
Turner says that the second phase of drama renovations will provide more office and rehearsal space, and is “absolutely needed.
“And that element will come, I’m certain of it. But the Thrust itself, and the donation, was for this public performance area,” says Turner. “And we definitely need more performance space.”
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