Shortly after posting my room + goals a user named BIGmouthinDC / Jeff Parkinson made a simple but elegant suggestion accompanied with a sketch that involved flipping the room around.
I hadn't considered this orientation because I presumed that having a door that opens right in front of the screen would be annoying. However, I quickly realized this could potentially give me more depth for an acoustically transparent screen + it would allow me to build a riser which would otherwise been much much more difficult considering the door would have to open into the raised riser / stage if the room were in the orientation I first imagined.
With a new direction in mind, I started drafting up models using Sketchup (which I learned exclusively for this project).