Writers Theatre, from Concept through Completion

In drama theaters, the unamplified human voice is used to convey both information and nuanced emotional cues to large groups of listeners. Supportive sound reflective surfaces are relatively distant from the actors, and the inherent (and desirable) reverberance of a larger space run counter to many accepted practices for achieving speech clarity in smaller spaces. Some theater configurations, such as thrust and in-the-round, are even arranged so that actor faces away from large segments of the audience at any given time, offering further challenges to the connection between actor and audience. This paper will present an understanding of the way that people listen to speech in large rooms, and approaches to room design to support the clarity of unamplified speech. The case study of Writers Theatre in Glencoe, Illinois, will be presented to describe the development of theater design from initial concept through computer modeling and finally with three dimensional measurements and visualizations of the acoustic environment in the completed room.