photo by: Contributed

A rendering shows the design for the Lawrence Public Library's new outdoor stage.

When the Lawrence Public Library installs its new outdoor stage next year, Brad Allen wants it to be a place for creativity – not a place for complications.

“The minute you need a sound technician to do storytime, it complicates storytime,” said Allen, the library’s executive director – and storytime is far from the only thing it will be hosting. That’s why one of his goals is to make the stage user-friendly, so that there’s “less to stand up” for people holding concerts, performances and other events there.

Design work on the outdoor stage is nearing completion, and while Allen didn’t have a hard date for when it would be installed, he said the library was aiming for the first half of next year.

“We can’t promise that it will be spring, but we’re hoping that it could be,” Allen said.

When it arrives, he said, it will realize the potential of the library lawn, which has been envisioned as an event space since back when the library and nearby parking garage were built. Back then, Allen said, the buildings were designed with performances on the lawn in mind, angled to be not completely parallel so that sound wouldn’t reverberate in undesired ways.

“The way that they built the face of the library and the garage was set up to try to have more events,” he said. “That was part of it.”

But the stage sat on the library’s list of projects for years without any funding identified. It was just this year, as the Journal-World has reported, that the library’s Friends & Foundation raised the funds to design and build the structure. At its annual After Hours fundraiser earlier this year, it brought in $400,000 for the pavilion and various other projects, a record amount for that event.

In July, Mayor Brad Finkeldei said that this was a project that the city had wanted for years, too. And Allen said the Friends & Foundation deserved a lot of credit for funding a project that whole community could benefit from.

“I really appreciate that support from our Friends and Foundation, because we’re doing something that really the intent is to be larger than the library itself,” he said.

The stage’s design has changed somewhat since it was originally proposed. Once, the structure was envisioned with four legs, one at each corner. But now, Allen said, the design is more open on the sides, with a viewing area that’s not blocked by columns or speaker stacks.

“I’ve always liked the idea of a cantilever, like we have on this building,” Allen said, but cantilevers are expensive and require the structure to extend deeper into the ground. This design has some of the aesthetics of a cantilever without that added complexity and cost, he said.

In the back of the stage will be a 6-foot “screen” so that the traffic on Kentucky Street won’t be as distracting. The library is still studying how that will look, but Allen said one idea was to use a design that’s “kind of abstract and colorful,” sort of like the vibrant bars of color that appear in the movie “Punch-Drunk Love.”

Performers might want a different backdrop or to block out more sunlight, and Allen said that would be possible on the stage, as well.

“We’ll have some kind of other thing – we’re not exactly sure yet – where you could just drop something that’s completely opaque,” he said. “Like, a band could hang something on it, or a lot of bands would project something on a screen or something like that.”

For the audio setup, ease of use is top of mind for Allen. There will be an AV rack built in, so people will be able to use the stage without bringing any of their own equipment.

“You could just have an iPad, set all this stuff up and run everything,” he said.

Often, outdoor shows in downtown can require a lot of setup. Allen mentioned concerts like the Live on Mass. series outside The Granada, and said that even expenses like portable toilets for those kinds of events can make them difficult to put on.

The library’s stage, he said, could be a space for smaller events that might not pack an entire block, and they could take advantage of the library’s existing infrastructure. He isn’t sure yet what the model will be for events that aren’t free, but he said the library encourages people to think creatively about how they could use the space.

“It has the opportunity to be something that so many people could use for things that we haven’t thought of yet,” Allen said.

If other organizations and community members have ideas, he said, he’s looking forward to collaborating. He said he wanted to “work with other folks to bring something together that’s more than just individual parts.”

“When we can give people the opportunity to dream and think of doing something they wouldn’t have thought of,” Allen said, “that’s really exciting to me.”