Riverside Theatre seeking donations for its next stage

“We’ve written probably the three biggest checks of our lives last week,” Producing Artistic Director Adam Knight said shortly after launching Riverside Theatre’s first capital campaign in 20 years.

Iowa City’s professional theater troupe will be writing many more checks as it enters the next stage in renovating its new home in the Crescent Block Building on the Ped Mall downtown.

It’s part of Tailwind Group’s College Street redevelopment project, and the company, based in Mankato, Minn., pledged $900,000 toward Riverside’s efforts, before fundraising even started.

Since then, the theater’s key stakeholders have pledged $595,000, raising a total to $1,495,000 — or 82 percent of the campaign’s $1.82 million goal.

Now Riverside is turning to the public to raise the final $305,000 needed to transform an empty space at 119 E. College St. into a state-of-the-art performance facility currently referred to as the Crescent Block Theatre.

“It’s going to help us finish up construction,” said Knight, 42, of Iowa City.

Among the donor options are monetary gifts at any level, as well as naming rights at various levels, including $2,000 to name a theater seat in honor or memory of a loved one.

The theater’s three floors will offer artists and patrons an expanded lobby and box office on the first floor; dressing rooms and conference rooms on the second floor; a 150-seat performance space that can be configured in numerous ways on the third floor; as well as an elevator and improved accessibility for audiences, cast and crew throughout.

The pandemic shuttered Riverside’s longtime Gilbert Street Stage at the end of June 2020, and supply line issues have pushed back the opening of the Crescent Block Theatre to February.

If everything stays on track, the new facility will open Feb. 4 with the world premiere of Mat Smart’s “Eden Prairie, 1971,” onstage through Feb. 20. The spring season will continue with the Iowa premiere of “The Niceties” by Eleanor Burgess, as well as “Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812,” Riverside Theatre’s first musical in more than a decade.

Construction process

Construction deadlines are giving Knight stage fright right now. He came to Riverside Theatre from New York City in 2018, where he had been producing plays in found spaces.

“It's a constant moving target,” he said of the deadlines, affected by supply line issues. “We had hoped to be in sometime this month. We're probably looking to be (inside) in December at this point.

“It's thrilling. I've never been a part of a construction project before. Every day we go in and there's something new and it feels more and more complete,” he said, with the recent installation of the elevator, the lighting grid system, walls, counters and stage.

“Not having control over every variable is terrifying, but that's also what theater is. Theater is about collaboration. Theater’s about relinquishing control and realizing that you're part of a larger wave and a larger story,” he said. “That's been the experience with this. It's an exercise in Zen at times, but the space is finding out what it wants to be.”

Collaboration had been an especially bright spot in the process, from the moment Kevin Monson, principal and chairman of the board for Neumann Monson Architects, found out Riverside was looking for a new space, and reached out about the Ped Mall project.

“It helped that Neumann Monson created a plan that was so intriguing,” Knight said. “Throughout the process, the architects and Tailwind have just been so willing to let Riverside say what it needs.

“Originally, we were occupying just that first floor and third floor. But as the talks went on, we started to occupy a lot more of that second floor, because we realized the need for those larger dressing rooms, the need for a proper green room, the need for a conference space.”

And while audiences won’t see the second floor, Knight it “really is key to this whole thing working, because it provides that more professional artist and organizational capability.”

He’s looking forward to “a million things” as the project progresses.

"Walking into the theater … just feels so vast,“ he said. “It feels like a space that wants to be filled. It's so rare to get a chance to open a theater, to start a theater where there wasn't one before. Gilbert Street had so many ghosts and so many lives that have been led there.

“We have a chance now to start a new tradition. To fill a space with stories that haven't been told before. It presents opportunities for the organization and the community to create a gathering space.”

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