By Laura Donnelly-Smith
Lisner Auditorium Production Manager Eric Annis had a perplexing problem. The auditorium’s hardback—a flat, solid structure that hangs at the rear of the stage and keeps the curtains from moving—was in sorry shape. It had been in use since Lisner Auditorium opened in 1946. Its frame was covered with deteriorating blue muslin fabric, and the design was outdated and cumbersome. Repairing or rebuilding it would be only a temporary fix.
Mr. Annis wasn’t thrilled with the auditorium’s bandshell, either. It consisted of nine separate pieces, which had to be assembled and hauled into place every time it was needed. In between, it was disassembled, folded up and stored under a set of stairs backstage. Neither the bandshell nor the hardback was easy to use, and Mr. Annis’s team spent a lot of time moving, inspecting and maintaining them.
“A hardback is important because it protects the curtain behind it, and it keeps the curtain in front of it from rippling,” Mr. Annis explained. “When artists are running back and forth backstage—sometimes carrying props that can damage the curtains—if the curtains out front billow, it takes away from the magic of the theater.”
Mr. Annis and his colleague Colin McGee, Lisner’s assistant technical director and master carpenter, began brainstorming about how they could fix both the hardback and the bandshell. “A long time ago, we started saying, ‘Let’s get something that’s a bandshell that can also be a hardback,’” Mr. Annis said. “But we looked around, and it didn’t exist.”
So Mr. Annis and Mr. McGee decided to design it themselves. They envisioned a hardback that would be essentially permanent, suspended from a truss on aircraft cables and raised and lowered by a motor. This same structure, they thought, could have sections at the top that would fold forward, in effect serving the same function as a bandshell in directing sound out toward the audience. They sketched out a design of 11 rectangular panels that would be attached to create one solid piece 36-foot-wide piece, but could be separated if needed.
Getting the weight distribution right would be crucial to designing the piece, Mr. McGee said, so that it could be retracted up into the rafters if necessary. “To our knowledge, no one had ever done this for a space like ours. We do every style of show here at Lisner, and we had to be able to completely get rid of [the hardback] when needed.”
They wanted to build a prototype, but were faced with a Catch-22 situation: While Assistant Vice President for Events and Venues Michael Peller had promised to secure funding for the project, he couldn’t get the funding without a detailed project plan. And without money to purchase supplies and build a prototype, Mr. Aniss’s team couldn’t produce the plan.
So the team built a one-panel prototype out of found materials left over from previous projects at Lisner. Dan Peterson, a master welder and part of Lisner’s production team, designed a set of wheels for the bottom of the panel, which folded up for easy storage while remaining attached. With the old bandshell, the wheels had to be removed every time it was stored.
The plan worked—the protoype allowed the team to plan the rest of the project, and Mr. Peller secured the funding for the supplies. The team worked to finish the project before the fall semester began.
“Nothing in this project came prefab, except for the wheels,” Mr. McGee said. “We had to weld everything together.” The team used light steel for the frame and wood to build the panels, and covered them with black Formica—the same kind used in kitchen countertops. The material is thin and brittle and bounces sound nicely, Mr. McGee said, and the black color blends into the stage background.
There wasn’t enough space to build the large panels in Lisner’s shop, so the team set up sawhorses and worked right on the stage. “We built everything in assembly-line style,” Mr. Peterson said. “It was a team effort. The first 80 percent of the project was enjoyable. Then it got repetitive. I was welding for two days straight.”
When the pieces were all completed, team members installed each component and held their breath, Mr. McGee said. “We’d done all the math, dotted our i’s and crossed our t’s, but it was still a little nerve wracking to put it all together.”
The results, however, were perfect. During the first week in September, the Washington Concert Opera became the first group to use the new hybrid bandshell/hardback, and it was far superior to the old bandshell, the conductor’s assistant told Mr. Annis. “He told me, ‘It makes our sound so much more live.’”
The new structure can be lowered directly from the rafters to serve as a hardback. When a bandshell is needed, the top fins fold forward, and the panels and can be separated and wheeled into different positions, depending on artists’ or performance groups’ needs. Visitors to Lisner Auditorium might be able to see the team’s handiwork, depending on the stage setup for the night’s production. But even if it’s not visible, it’s serving its purpose effectively behind the scenes, Mr. McGee said.
“We’re problem solvers here. A big part of our job is creating solutions and making the things that are needed.”