After 6-year wait, Frank Lloyd Wright's 100-seat theater at Taliesin set to reopen

The stairs at Hillside Theatre are steep, the views from the round, red-cushioned seats force the audience to look down while windows allow the venue to be flooded with natural light.

The more than 70-year-old stage curtain is a colorful mosaic of fabric and hand stitching that reflects an abstract interpretation of the natural beauty of northern Iowa County.

It also relays the architectural style of Frank Lloyd Wright who created the buildings that have melded into this 800-acre rural landscape of rolling hills and trout streams of the Wyoming Valley. The curtain includes piano keys; a thick, black horizontal line that represents the nearby Wisconsin River; and even a chimney with black puffs of smoke that some say represent Taliesin, Wright's home, studio and school.

"It's one of those sort of apocryphal stories where it's hard to say if it's true but it's such a good story," said Kyle Dockery, Taliesin's collections coordinator. "It's a really unique piece. Having this still in tact and looking as gorgeous as it is, is a real treasure for us."

Conformance to the norms were never a part of Frank Lloyd Wright's lexicon. 

And now, his intimate, 100-seat theater amid the Taliesin compound is finally ready for a performance after being closed for six years. A $1.1 million renovation that began in 2019, then halted and hindered by the COVID-19 pandemic, is complete. But when the audience arrives for the evening show on June 8, the improvements may not be immediately noticeable.

The theater largely looks the same but the improvements include new LED theater lighting, a new sub-floor beneath the stage and upgraded electrical and plumbing systems. There are two new green rooms, an accessible bathroom back stage and an accessible bathroom for the audience with wood trim cut from a felled oak tree on the Taliesin property. The entire theater will also be more comfortable thanks to a new heating and air conditioning system that will also extend the season by a few months.

This is, after all, a Wright-designed building of locally quarried sandstone. Trying to maintain a cozy temperature in the winter months remains impractical. 

"It allows us to probably extend our season into November and then start more in April," said Ryan Hewson, preservation manager of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, which owns Taliesin. "Those winter months are still going to be hard because we just can't get it warm enough. But it allows people to be more comfortable when we're having a performance and it's much better for the artifacts that are in here. We don't have a museum-quality environment but we've certainly shrunk the band of humidity and temperature jump."

The restoration project was partially funded by a $320,000 Save America's Treasures grant from the National Park Service along with contributions from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and Taliesin Preservation, with the work done by two Taliesin preservationists.

The first show is sold-out and features Third Coast Percussion, a Grammy Award winning quartet from Chicago. However, it will allow the theater to use, for the first time, its new set of cameras that can live-stream shows and other events to a wider audience around the world.

Among those scheduled to be in attendance at the show will be Kelly Oliver, a Wright apprentice who worked on the theater's redesign following a 1952 fire, and Minerva Montooth, who recently turned 100 and is the widow of Charles Montooth, whose work includes the Prairie School in Racine. Minerva, who for decades has lived in an apartment behind Wright's famed studio, was an assistant for 25 years to Wright's third and final wife, Olgivanna and is believed to be one of the few remaining people to have personally known the couple.

While no other shows have yet been set, Hewson said future acts and events could include piano recitals, small band and orchestral groups, choral concerts, talks on Taliesin and architecture, small plays and the showing of movies.

"We felt like this gave us a great opportunity to not only restore this building, which really needed a lot of help, but also be able to share it with the public," Hewson said. "We can invite people to see architecture in action, as I say, as opposed to getting a tour, which is great. But I think it's more meaningful to see it in person being used."

The theater is significant in the storied timeline of Wright's career. His aunts, Jane Lloyd Jones and Nell Lloyd Jones, his mother's sisters, commissioned Wright to build a facility for their Hillside Home School. Completed in 1903, the school, where "Fighting Bob" La Follette's children attended, included a gymnasium with a short running track above. The school closed in 1915 and for years the building was unused before Wright took possession in 1932 to use the building for his school. The gymnasium was gradually converted to a theater and a foyer added to the south end of the building before it was destroyed in 1952 by fire.

The theater and the adjacent Hillside Dining Room were immediately reconstructed by Wright and since that time, the spaces have served as key gathering spots for students, guests and the public. The theater includes a 1925 Steinway Concert Grand piano and a six-panel Coromandel screen that is a smaller replica of the original 12-panel screen that Wright purchased in China in the early 1920s. The original is now in storage awaiting what could likely be a more than $100,000 conservation effort, Hewson said.

But even without performers, eyes are immediately drawn to the 36-foot-wide, 12-foot-tall stage curtain. It underwent conservation in 2006 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and in 2009 was part of the museum's exhibition on Wright.

A 2020 restoration project, done as the curtain hung in the theater, addressed the worn gold lamé that runs along the bottom of the curtain. Many of the pieces of yarn, which hang and sway with the curtain, had been broken or detached along with some of the felt pieces at some of the corners, Dockery said.

The curtain was designed by Wright shortly after the fire of 1952 but stitched together by apprentices without his knowledge and then given to him as an 89th birthday present in 1956 when the theater opened. But Wright being Wright, who was born in Richland Center and died in 1959, made an unusual modification to the curtain that can still be seen today.

"He wasn't entirely happy with it so he got up on a ladder the next day and was applying some Nescafe instant coffee to the upper part of the canvas to sort of tone down the bright, white color of it," Dockery said. "That's our favorite story. If it works, it works."