They oughta call it the magic pagoda. The new high-tech theater before you has been compared to that famous house in Sydney Harbour. That's a bit of a stretch. But since it opened three years ago, the auditorium with the bright-red Asiatic aesthetic has transformed a lakeside industrial area into a lively arts zone centered on a former shipwrights' lane. Among his tricks, the building's Pritzker Prize–winning native architect managed to incorporate a massive old gas–holder into his $33 million creation. If that's not magic… The lake's small size (two hundred acres) and name (it means deep loch) suggest its origins as a terminal moraine. Indeed, you are in a lake district that was carved out during the Ice Age. And a river runs through it, one that shares its name with a recent president of a neighboring country, a dissident playwright who smoked his way into the history books. Over centuries, this terrain of ancient woods and moors was developed into a city of 150,000 residents, a healthy percentage of whom are students and research scientists. You're most likely familiar with it from a conference of bigwigs held here in the middle of the last century. Those with an obscure sense of geography also know that the city lent its name to a town in the largest of New York's counties. A colonnaded summer palace in this former imperial city was built by a ruler as his carefree retreat (he once hosted a candid man of letters until the latter ticked him off). You will also want to wander the so-called Dutch neighborhood, and perhaps will gravitate to a fantastical 1920s observatory, or look for Cruise and Tarantino in the historic film studio. Just don't be late for your pre-show dinner in the restaurant in the old chicory mill next to this arts center.

So far, the new theater has staged works by Sartre and Wilde as well as adaptations of a novel by a formerly fatwa-ed author and one about a young Elvis impersonator in Nigeria. How's that for artistic freedom. Not surprising in a city that was once a beacon of intellectual freedom… until it wasn't, following that fateful aforementioned conference.

Where are you, anyhow?

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