Ramblin': Mural to grace lobby with theater history

CEDAR RAPIDS - As a regular patron at flood-damaged Theatre Cedar Rapids, you may not recognize the new, improved lobby when it reopens this month, but you'll see some familiar faces.

Why, there are Catherine Blades and Gene Whiteman. Isn't that Doug Jackson? Elise Vaux? Look even closer, and you'll spot Max Hahn (Dr. Max) and others from the early days.

In a 22-foot-long, full-color mural - re-created from old photographs that once graced the wall - the faces, the sets, the history of the theater company will come alive.

“It was never about the facility to me,” says Richard Barker, the mural's creator and retired artistic director after 27 years with the theater. “It was the people, who I met and who I worked with.”

So Barker poured over old pictures, most taken by Cedar Rapids photographer George Henry. He rephotographed what he liked and loaded the pictures onto a computer. He moved one picture here, another there. He added graphics, including a reference to the early 1930s at the Killian Tea Room. More than 60 hours later, the mural matured on his computer as a 1-inch equals 1-foot scale creation.

“It wasn't who it was at all,” says Barker, 59, about selecting nearly 100 faces for the mural. “It was the expressions on their faces. I wanted it to be emotional.”

Spoken like a true theater gourmet, a man in theater since his days at Simpson College 40 years ago, a man who directed 150 plays at Theatre Cedar Rapids involving more than 3,000 actors.

To say the theater was close to his heart, that its destruction in the Flood of 2008 tore him up, is an understatement.

“I wouldn't have made it through the flood,” he says. “They needed very young, very energetic people to get through that. They've done a wonderful job.”

(At the Theatre Cedar Rapids Web site, www.theatrecr.org, you can check in daily to see videos on the progress of construction, up to the grand opening Feb. 26.)

“That's your baby. You watched it grow,” Barker says. “This is where I met the people I love. It's the way community theater has always been, about the people.”

So, given the opportunity to apply his own extensive photography background to a mural, Barker quickly agreed to the project. Then, thinking about it, he became overwhelmed. Selecting just a few photographs from thousands became more difficult than casting a play.

“I knew right off the bat there was no way to win,” he says, chuckling. “People would say, ‘Oh, thank you for putting me in,' or they'd say, ‘Oh, why did you leave him out?'”

Smiles. Frowns. Inquisitive expressions. Surprise. One emotion after another, sets as backdrops, colors exploding.

“Everything I do, I like to do it so I bring vision into it, with a lot of layers,” says Barker, who produces similar works for image/afterimage, the photography/art business he started after leaving TCR in 2008.

His creation is being converted into wall art by Presentations Inc., which plans to mount it on the lobby's north wall and cover it with Plexiglas before the theater reopens.

“I hope it blows up well,” Barker says. “I think people like the idea of a timeline and history and murals.”