The Nightlight Cinema has a room called Screen 1 1/2 — a name that admits what everyone who has sat in it already knows: it is the small one, the afterthought, the room that fits between the marquee auditorium and the lobby. On Saturday, Oct. 24, at noon, that room will be given over to reeds, splints and wooden bases. Sharon Klusmann, who owns Cornerstone Baskets & Bases and has been weaving since 1985, will teach a three-hour basket-weaving class there, and every ticket comes with a free voucher to see Wicker at any showtime during its run at the theater.
The pairing is not as arbitrary as it first looks. Wicker, which opens in theaters Oct. 23, 2026, is a romantic fantasy comedy written and directed by Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson and adapted from the short story "The Wicker Husband" by Ursula Wills. Its cast is led by Olivia Colman, with Alexander Skarsgård, Elizabeth Debicki, Marli Siu, Nabhaan Rizwan, Richard E. Grant and Peter Dinklage. The plot turns on a reclusive fisherwoman in a small medieval farming town — a place with a rigid social hierarchy and a patriarchal culture — who is mocked for her persistent fish smell and her refusal of institutionalized marriage. When the teasing about her spinster status intensifies, she sarcastically commissions a husband made of wicker. The town's master weaver brings the Wicker Husband to life, and his utility and devotion to his wife produce a romance that the film treats as both absurd and genuine. Lol Crawley shot it; Anna Meredith wrote the score; it runs 105 minutes. The film received positive reviews from critics.
So the class is, in a sense, a piece of method programming: three hours of learning how a basket actually holds together, followed by a movie in which a basket holds together a marriage. The Nightlight is not the first cinema to build an event around a film's subject matter, but the specificity here — a working weaver teaching in a converted screening room, with the movie as the chaser — is the kind of thing a small independent theater can do and a multiplex cannot.
Klusmann is not a hobbyist drafted in for a stunt. Her business, Cornerstone Baskets & Bases, takes its name from 1 Peter 2:6 — "Behold I am laying in Zion a stone, a Cornerstone chosen and precious" — a verse quoted at the top of her website. She has been designing and teaching basketry since a year after she learned it herself, and the Kentucky Basket Association notes that she recently marked her 41st year of weaving. Her site carries more than 100 original designs, sold as patterns, complete kits and wooden bases. She teaches from a home studio in Tallmadge, Ohio, and travels to national conventions and guild events around the country; her published teaching schedule includes the Nature Coast Basket Weaving Guild in Brooksville, Florida and the Bluegrass Area Basketmakers Seminar in Carrollton, Kentucky. Her designs have names like Charmy, Spring Daisy, Cinnamon Spice and Spearmint Twist, and she is known for embellishments that push a functional basket toward the decorative.
The bases are the other half of the operation. Her husband, Tom, handles what the family business calls the BASE side — a full line of hardwood basket bases in a variety of shapes and sizes, produced in-house, with custom orders available. It means a student in Screen 1 1/2 will be working on a foundation cut and finished by the person who has been cutting and finishing them all along.
Her site also advertises a home retreat with a line that suggests the Klusmann sense of humor runs toward the literal: "Underwater basket weaving? Yes, please!" — a weekend of weaving poolside and in the studio, with food and new friends. It is the sort of joke that a basket weaver, of all people, has earned the right to make.
The Nightlight itself has a history that makes a class like this plausible. The theater opened in July 2014 at 30 N. High St. in downtown Akron, founded in part by Rob Lucas, who was deeply involved in Akron's film community and died in July 2020 after a long battle with cancer. Before it existed, Akron was one of the largest cities in the country without a venue for independent and foreign films, a gap that the theater's founders set out to close through a Kickstarter campaign billed as "Akron's first venue for independent film." That origin, as much as anything, explains why the Nightlight would say yes to a basket-weaving class: a cinema built by people who had to argue for its existence tends to be open to uses a chain would never consider.
The class runs from noon to 3 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 24, and is repeated at the same hour on Sunday, Oct. 25. Tickets are sold through the theater, and the Wicker voucher is good for any showtime during the film's run rather than a single designated screening — which means a student can spend the afternoon learning to weave and then come back another evening to watch what happens when someone weaves a husband.