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(RED BANK, NJ) Two River Theatre Company broke ground Wednesday for its new 300-seat theatre in Red Bank. More than 175 TRTC subscribers, board members, contributors, business owners, and VIP’s attended the ceremony that began at 10:30 a.m., October 22nd. The professional theatre company, currently performing its 10th anniversary season at the Algonquin Arts Theatre in Manasquan, will open its new Red Bank theatre in early 2005.
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(left to right) Architect Stewart Jones; Congressman Rush Holt; The Honorable Edward McKenna, Mayor of Red Bank; Founders/Producers of the theatre, Joan and Robert Rechnitz; Artistic Director, Jonathan Fox; and TRTC Board President, Mary Carol Stunkel
Community leaders, educators and municipal, state and federal government officials were in attendance. David Tarver of the Red Bank Board of Education and Executive Director/Founder of the Red Bank Education and Development Initiative spoke about how theatre has the power to change lives and how, personally, theatre had greatly enhanced his own education.
The Honorable Edward McKenna, Mayor of Red Bank, spoke of his support for the new theatre and said it would serve as an anchor to the city’s arts corridor along with the Count Basie Theatre and the new Children’s Cultural Arts Center. It was also noted that the theatre will have a tremendous economic impact in Red Bank. A recent Rutgers University report states that people attending not-for-profit arts events spend an average of $25.94 per person, in addition to the price of admission. This money rolls back into the community to hotels, restaurants, parking garages, babysitters, and more.
TRTC was founded in 1993 by Joan and Robert Rechnitz. Following the dramatic reading of the Samuel Coleridge poem “Kubla Khan” by professional actress and TRTC Board Member, Maureen Silliman, Mr. Rechnitz delivered a passionate and poetic speech about his desire to create, as described in the Coleridge poem, “a pleasure dome…it will be holy and enchanted, it will be haunted by women wailing for their demon-lovers, it will be filled with visions of damsels with dulcimers, and knights, and ogres, villains, and heroes.” (See Photo. For the full text of Mr. Rechnitz’s comments, see below.)
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Robert Rechnitz, founder and Executive Producer of TRTC
Other participating/supporting dignitaries included: U.S. Congressman Rush Holt; State Assemblyman Joseph Kyrillos; Paul G. Gaffney II, President of Monmouth University, and Dr. Edward Westervelt, Superintendent of Red Bank Regional Schools. A video crew from Brookdale Community College documented the proceedings, and students from the Red Bank Charter School helped with decorations and the presentation of the requisite “gold shovels.”
The building, designed by New York architect Stewart Jones, of Hardy, Holzman, Pfeiffer & Associates, features a dramatic forty-foot high glass-walled lobby with a sweeping roof evoking the wave in the TRTC logo. (See Photo.)
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Architect's rendering of exterior of new Two River Theatre
TRTC has begun a capital campaign to raise the $15-million cost of the building. An initial gift of $5-million dollars has been secured with a challenge grant of an additional $5-million to be matched by gifts from the community.
Programming funding for TRTC is provided by the NJ State Council on the Arts/Department of State, a partner agency of the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional funding is provided by the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, the Stone Foundation of New Jersey, The Gannett Foundation, The Sunfield Foundation, and Ocean First Foundation, as well as gifts from many generous individuals and corporations, including Target Stores.
Following the dramatic reading of the Samuel Coleridge poem “Kubla Khan” by professional actress and TRTC Board Member, Maureen Silliman. Mr. Robert Rechnitz delivered the following passionate and poetic speech about his desire to create, as described in the Coleridge poem, a pleasure dome.
Like Kubla Khan, we plan to build a pleasure-dome. It will be a bit smaller than the twice five miles of walls and towers that Kubla Khan had in mind. But it will be like Kubla’s, a savage place, it will be holy and enchanted, it will be haunted by women wailing for their demon-lovers, it will be filled with visions of damsels with dulcimers, and knights, and ogres, villains, and heroes. And all that great legion, the giant, mythic figures of the imagination which Two River Theatre will labor to create in the years to come will generate a world which speaks a language native to the human heart. A language that children know, but that adults forget, because we do not speak it often enough and the vocabulary slips away. But yet it is our native language, and when we hear it spoken—by Shakespeare, by Chekhov, by Tennessee Williams, by Tom Stoppard—we recall what has slipped away from us. “We recollect with a happy shock of recognition the language native to our hearts. Then, with joy, watching the play, we sense that, for a while at any rate, we have come back to our true home and we feed on honey dew and drink the milk of Paradise.
Then we leave the theater and go to our everyday homes, and for a time we continue to feed on these mythic foods and we perceive dimly or strongly, for an hour, a day, just how inadequate our everyday diets are, how inadequate is a steady diet of only the job, commercial enterprise, the bottom line. Theatre calls to us, whispers in our ears, urgently and insistently, “You Must Change Your Life.” And we yearn to grasp the unlived life, we sense it is properly our birthright. If only we could take the time, if only we can find the way to get it right, to sort things out, to get back on track.
This building, our theatre, should make that unlived life more nearly possible for this community and all of its inhabitants.
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