The sprawling marble complex has been asked to provide the court with physical evidence that it is not merely a very large, carpeted hallway waiting to be repurposed.
The United States District Court has inadvertently waded into the treacherous semiotics of performance, demanding that the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts produce a physical calendar of its upcoming programming to legally prove to the Trump administration that the monolithic structure still occasionally functions as a theater.
The judicial decree, handed down as the Trump administration prepares to descend upon the sprawling campus with a fleet of renovation crews, asks a question as philosophically devastating as it is bureaucratically banal: does the preeminent cultural institution of the American capital actually do anything, or is it simply an empty atrium waiting for gold-leaf drywall?
To demand a binding schedule of events from an institution that has for so long subsisted on the sheer, unarticulated vibe of its own geographic importance is to commit an act of catastrophic literalism; it recalls, to the educated observer, the crushing bureaucratic weight that doomed Vsevolod Meyerhold’s 1922 aborted constructivist staging of The Magnanimous Cuckold; it forces the ephemeral sigh of the Muses into rigid, inescapable scheduling, much like the tragic inevitability of the gods in Wagner’s Götterdämmerung; or, if one must draw a parallel for the jurisprudential philistines currently holding the gavels, it mirrors the agonizing, rules-based constraints placed upon the golden retriever who just wanted to play football in the 1998 cinematic anomaly Air Bud: Golden Receiver.
The administration of President Donald Trump has long viewed the Edward Durell Stone-designed edifice not as a sanctuary for the performing arts, but as a vast, tragically under-monetized volume of air overlooking the Potomac. The proposed renovations, which have sparked this entire existential crisis, are ostensibly meant to modernize the facility, though architectural insiders whisper that the plans consist largely of replacing the opera house with a luxury mixed-use concourse and encasing the busts of deceased presidents in a tasteful, high-yield brass.
Faced with the immediate threat of demolition crews, the Kennedy Center must now justify its own continued physical existence by demonstrating that a sufficient number of people are planning to sit in velvet chairs and watch a cellist in the coming fiscal year.
This is no small task for a programming department that has historically relied on the assumption that a touring production of a Broadway musical, perhaps one featuring the agonizingly familiar choreography of a decade ago, would simply materialize in the Eisenhower Theater when the weather turned cold. Now, the court requires a document; a physical manifestation of cultural intent; a spreadsheet asserting that art will occur at 8:00 p.m. on a Tuesday, lest the state reclaim the building for an indoor golf simulator.
We are being asked to quantify the inherently unquantifiable, to reduce the soaring majesty of our semi-annual mezzo-soprano recitals into an itemized defense against a real estate developer's wrecking ball.
Consider the sheer panic that must currently be gripping the center’s curation staff, individuals who are accustomed to operating with the languid pace of a glacier but must now rapidly invent a season of indisputable merit. Will they attempt to placate the administration by scheduling an endless loop of patriotic brass bands, thereby sacrificing their avant-garde credentials on the altar of self-preservation? Or will they stubbornly lean into the esoteric, booking a six-hour, intermission-less Lithuanian noise opera, daring the judge to declare that such an auditory assault does not constitute legally protected cultural programming?
One suspects they will take the coward's way out, relying on the impregnable, bourgeois safety of The Nutcracker to carry them through the winter months.
The irony, of course, is that the Kennedy Center has spent the last half-century striving to be a monument to the timeless, only to be threatened with obliteration because it cannot adequately account for the time between next October and November. The public, presumed by the court to still possess some atrophied hunger for the performing arts, will now wait in breathless anticipation to see if the institution can summon enough mediocre Chekhov revivals to stave off the bulldozers.