The Great Room: A Dynamic New Experience
The Re-Imagined Hanna Theatre experience will be:

• Engaging & Inviting: The Re-Imagined Hanna Theatre’s thrust theater orientation, one in which the audience is seated on three sides of the actors’ playing area, will create a unique experience for our region where audiences are effectively seated in the same room as the performers. This “three-dimensional” encounter with performances is communal, exciting and visceral.
• Intimate & Customizable: The new Hanna Theatre’s 550 seat thrust configuration will afford its audiences an exciting and uniquely intimate theater experience. The furthest seat from the stage is twelve rows. Patrons will choose from a variety of seating of opportunities ranging from traditional theater seats and club chairs, to banquettes and private box seating. Guests will self define their encounter with the event in order to maximize their evening’s enjoyment whether spending time with friends, colleagues or family.
• Interactive: The design of the space will encourage social and cultural interaction from the street to the stage, from pre-show cocktails to post-show conversation. Interactive video screens will connect the patron to the performance even when they are away from their seat, support the Festival’s informational lobby display programs and infuse the new theater space with energy and vitality.
• Comfortable: The new theater will feature the finest in audience amenities including seat and leg room dimensions modeled after the finest loges in PlayhouseSquare, accessible concessions areas and a handsome and sleekly functional bar.

State-of the-ART- Innovation Meets Creation
The Re-Imagined Hanna Theatre will feature:

• The “Parker Hannifin Stage”: A fully-flexible, hydraulic, thrust stage in three sections – underwritten by Cleveland-based Parker Hannifin Corporation, the world’s leader in motion technology – will allow ultimate flexibility and maximum audience impact. In the Hanna’s new thrust configuration, audiences will sit on three sides of the playing area and inhabit the same room as the performers. The theater will function in two radically different configurations – one room thrust and two room proscenium theater – supporting many genres of presentation from Shakespeare to the American musical comedy and from theater to other art forms such as music, opera and dance. With a push of a button, the “Parker Hannifin Stage” can descend to floor level to restore the theatre to a proscenium, or picture frame, orientation and descend below the house floor to create a fully equipped orchestra pit capable of housing a complete ensemble. The hydraulic stage can even raise and lower entire sets during performances.
• Visionary Theatrical Engineering: An automatic, structurally independent fly system, an engineering “first” pioneered by architecture firm Westlake Reed Leskosky, promises to position the Re-Imagined Hanna Theatre as one of the most innovative theater renovations in the country.
• Green Design: GLTF’s Hanna Theatre project is currently registered with the United States Green Building Council and its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System.  The project is pursuing a silver rating.  LEED encourages and accelerates global adoption of sustainable green building and development practices by certifying projects that incorporate design and construction practices that significantly reduce the negative impact of buildings on their environment.  By equipping the Hanna with new, state-of-the-art theatrical systems, updating the theater’s indoor environmental systems, employing enviro-friendly construction materials, recycling construction waste and improving safety and efficiency standards with an emphasis on green design, the new Hanna Theatre is environmentally sensible.