Every Room Has an Audience

What if your real client isn't the person signing the contract — it's everyone who will ever sit in the seats?

Summary

In TRXL 230, I welcomed Keith Gerchak, design principal at TheaterDNA, a consulting firm that works alongside architecture practices like Gehry Partners and SANAA on bespoke performing arts projects. His career arc is one of the more unusual ones I've come across in 230 episodes: child actor at Playhouse Square in Cleveland, architecture degree from Tulane, studio director renovating the very theaters he performed in, theater consultant in New York, and now design principal for a firm that creates what he calls "rooms for storytelling" — theaters, concert halls, opera houses, dance studios, screening rooms, and amphitheaters.

Oh, and he's also been co-writing, directing, and producing an independent feature film for the last 12 years. Lost and Found in Cleveland, a reimagining of the Wizard of Oz set in post-industrial Cleveland, with Martin Sheen, Dennis Haysbert, June Squibb, Stacy Keach, Jon Lovitz, and Loretta Devine was released in 500 theaters nationwide in fall 2025.

The thread running through this entire conversation is something Keith says early and returns to often: whether he's designing a concert hall or fighting for a film's theatrical release, the question is always the same. There's a story being told, there's an audience receiving it, and the designer's job is to make sure the room serves both. That framing, it turns out, applies to a lot more than just theaters.

What's Inside

• Rooms for Storytelling. What Keith's framework for performing arts projects reveals about how architects (and their project teams) can lose sight of who a building is really for.
• The Project and the Script. How a 12-year independent film production mirrors an eight-year performing arts project, and what both reveal about keeping a design vision alive through years of pressure to dilute it.
• When Technology Loses the Thread. Why layers of documentation, Revit coordination, and AI-assisted code analysis can put distance between a designer's intent and the people doing the work.
• The Consolidation Problem. Independent filmmakers and independent architecture firms are facing the same structural squeeze, and what Keith learned fighting for screen time applies to finding your audience as a practice.
• The Case for Working by Hand. Why Keith still sketches every project, what AI got wrong when TheaterDNA tested it on building code, and where human judgment remains the thing you cannot outsource.