In the “Utopia” episode of Easy, the Joe Swanberg-directed series for Netflix, Malin Akerman plays a woman in charge of renovating the nearly 100-year-old Davis Theater in Lincoln Square, which began as a vaudeville house in 1918. The actual owner of the Davis, Tom Fencl, appears in a walk-through of the grand auditorium that Swanberg shot midrenovation; in the scene, Fencl wears a pink hard hat and asks Akerman how many seats the auditorium will hold.
Fencl’s design team also put “a lot of energy” into creating spacious restrooms, he says, from where the former vaudeville house’s sloped seating used to be. “We converted what was the ladies’ room into two family restrooms,” Fencl says, “and these back two theaters we turned into stadium-style seating, which then allowed us to be able to do large restrooms.”
The Carbon Arc dining area features a long bar and a mix of booth and table seating, some of which is shared to foster pre- or postmovie discussion, as well as several wide-screen TVs lining each wall for broadcasting special events like sports games or award shows.
The experience#
The Davis plays three first-run movies every week and, according to Fencl, will sometimes split a screen to play a fourth movie, depending on what’s playing. “Being in a family neighborhood,” Fencl says, “we like to have a family movie playing at all times. And then in the evenings, we’ll split a screen with a rated-G movie and a rated-R movie.”
For the Super Bowl this year, Fencl says a patron rented out all three screens: the younger kids watched a movie in one room, the older kids played video games on wireless remotes from an Xbox “plugged right into our projector” in another, and the adults and older teens watched the game in the auditorium.
“Yes,” Fencl says. “That’s a great way of putting it. We’re a community theater, and we like to open our doors for those types of community events.”
