Frontmezzjunkies reports: No Return Visits to the Kennedy Center for this Theatre Critic

By Ross

For years, I went to Washington not for politics, but for art (and friendship).

The Kennedy Center was once a place I loved deeply, a destination I traveled to specifically for their generously offered press nights to see magnificent shows, usually brought forth by Broadway Center Stage. I went there, mainly because of the ambition, craft, and ingenuity of what was being put on its stages. I saw a number of magnificent productions there: Follies, Little Shop of Horrors, Next to Normal, Tommy, Chess, The Music Man, Side Show, Bright Star, performed by artists operating at the height of their powers, sometimes just before those productions transferred to Broadway. The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts felt alive then: a national home for theatre and other performing arts like the dance production, Bowie and Queen, that were born in the heartfelt belief in the importance of artists, complexity, risk, and excellence.

That place no longer exists.

The recent vote by the Kennedy Center board to rename the institution after that Orange Monster is not merely misguided; it is cultural vandalism. It is an act so historically ignorant, artistically incoherent, and politically craven that it amounts to blasphemy against the very idea of a national arts center.

The Kennedy Center was never meant to be a branding exercise or a vanity project. As President Lyndon B. Johnson stated at its founding, it was intended to be “a national project and a national possession,” one that would symbolize the belief that “the world of creation and thought are at the core of all civilization.” Naming it after John F. Kennedy was an act of memorial and meaning: honoring a president who understood the dignity of labor, the necessity of culture, and the role artists play in shaping civic life.

To now slap on the name of a man who has shown open contempt for artists, workers, intellectual life, and free expression onto that institution is not just inappropriate; it is completely obscene.

With that being said, I fully support Actors’ Equity Association in condemning this move as lawless. Their statement rightly points out that this board appears more interested in ideological posturing than in fulfilling its mission or addressing the measurable collapse of audience trust. Ticket sales have plummeted. Attendance has cratered. Between early September and mid-October, nearly half the seats in the Kennedy Center’s largest venues sat empty, the worst showing since the days of the pandemic. That is not coincidence. That is consequence.

Artists and audiences alike are walking away, not because they no longer love theatre or the performing arts, but because they recognize when a space no longer loves them back.

Until that man’s name is removed, until the current board is dismantled, and until the Kennedy Center recommits itself to serving artists rather than silencing them, I will not return. I will not review shows there. I will not support the institution with my presence, my labor, my attention, or my love.

What makes this especially painful is that this is not indifference; it is grief. I am mourning a place that once stood for something larger than power, ego, or partisan spectacle. A place that once believed the arts were not accessories to politics, but essential to democracy itself.

That belief deserves defending.
And until it is restored, my seat will remain empty.