Studio Gang

Designed to immerse audiences and actors in the rich landscape of the Hudson Valley, the Scripps Theater Center’s unique indoor-outdoor setting for the company’s open-air productions offers an unparalleled theater experience. With a focus on ecological restoration and climate-smart investment in green design, the new campus is unique in the wider cultural landscape of the American theater, bringing together cultural placemaking, educational programming, community engagement, and environmental sustainability onto one spectacular site.

Founded in 1987 with an outdoor production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Manitoga, Hudson Valley Shakespeare moved the following summer to Boscobel House and Gardens, where its mainstage season was performed under a seasonal open-air tent for decades. In 2022, HVS moved to its current 98-acre campus in Garrison, NY, conveyed to the company by Christopher Davis.

Led by the renowned architecture and urban design practice Studio Gang, the design of the Scripps Theater extends the theater’s year-round functionality, improves circulation across the campus, and enables a wider range of programming. Featuring a curved, timber-framed grid shell, the new theater provides improved rehearsal, performance, education, and amenity spaces; expanded accessibility for more diverse audiences; and technical additions that create new opportunities for HVS productions. The theater’s natural material palette and curved structure help the architecture integrate with the surrounding landscape. Positioning nature at the forefront of the theater’s creative work, the stage’s proscenium arch frames iconic views of the Hudson Highlands, creating the natural backdrop HVS productions are known for having. Adjacent to the 6,800-square-foot, 451-seat theater is an additional 10,000-square-foot area with dressing rooms, a green room, wardrobe facilities, and offices, as well as separate spaces for concessions and public washrooms.

Beginning with a comprehensive master plan for the 98-acre site in 2020, landscape architects Nelson Byrd Woltz designed the campus around habitat restoration and a poetic arrival experience. Supporting HVS’s commitment to integrating nature into the life of the theater, the campus design includes fourteen acres of new plantings that reinvigorate the site’s biodiversity and draw visitors into the Hudson Valley landscape. Accessible paths wind through native meadows, arriving at sweeping views over the Hudson and the magnificent cliffs of the Wey-Gat (“Wind Gate”) —a prelude to the theater. Ample picnic lawns face the stage and the river.

The architecture and landscape design work together to place both art and the environment center stage for generations to come. Integrated sustainability strategies, including the use of low-carbon mass timber, rooftop solar panels, rainwater harvesting and reuse, and restored native grasses and wetlands that support biodiversity, have put the theater on track to receive LEED Platinum certification and to become the first purpose-built, open-air theater in the United States to achieve this level of certification. HVS is also committed to achieving carbon neutrality for its campus by 2040.