First, to be honest. The title of this post is not original to me. And it’s not something I necessarily believe. But perhaps, like avoiding a black cat crossing the road in front of you, kings are a bit suspicious when they think about what the theater might do to their reputations. I have no personal knowledge of this of course, but King Donald the Despicable probably does. And of course, if he is concerned about this, it would be through intuition. No one, lest of all King D, remembers the last time he actually went to the theater.

But this fear is obviously what is behind his Kennedy coup, his takeover of the Board of Directors of the Kennedy Center and his appointment of Himself as Grand Poobah.

There are many ramifications to this. Federal funding only supplies about 20% (I think that is correct) of the Kennedy Center’s budget, the rest coming from ticket sales and philanthropic contributions. One of the biggest contributors has been David Rubinstein, whom King D supplanted, and who has contributed about $100 million to the Center. That, by the way, is approximately $100 million more than I have. So we know that outside contributions will fall, and probably fall precipitously. I have also recently read that ticket bookings, in this highly anti-DT DMV, have fallen 50% since the day of the coup. The Kennedy Center cannot stand these losses for very long.

We have also seen that some of the individual scheduled programs have pulled out of the Kennedy Center and others, we assume, have been cancelled. And we know that those KC stalwarts, like the Washington Opera and the National Sympathy, who really have no choice but to stay, are going to be innocent victims of all of this turmoil.

One of the shows to pull out is a production of Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day, which had been scheduled to open for a two week run in early March, coming from a highly reviewed run on Broadway. The reasons given were “financial”. I guess that is possible, if ticket sales abruptly went down, but because this play has been advertised for some time, and was close to opening, I think that it is more likely that (like the drag shows, which the King mentioned in his coup address) the show was canceled for idealogical reasons.

Eureka Day was first presented in DC about five years ago. We saw it at a mid-size DC theater, Mosaic, just before the start of the pandemic. As I recall, it is a very clever, well written play, which does cause you to think, it presents a dilemma which may have no clear answer.

Let’s see how much I remember. It is a private day school in Southern California, and a very, very liberal place. It is so liberal that it permits parents who do not want to get their children vaccinated to let their unvaccinated children come to school anyway. Back then (the olden days of 2019 or 2020), mandatory vaccination policies were the norm.

All is fine at the Eureka Day school, until the mumps arrive. And the question becomes whether the liberal vaccine policy needs to be changed to protect students. The debate, which forms the basis of the play, is staged between (do I recall this, or am I imagining it?) between school administrators and parents.

There you have it. King Don the Terrible takes over the Kennedy Center and the first play to open after his coup is about VACCINES. Do you really think it closed for “financial reasons”?

Yes, one of the purposes of theater, beyond entertaining the audience and showing off the skills of the cast and production staff, is focusing on subjects that make you think. And perhaps make you think in ways different from the ways you were thinking when you first came into the theater. Last week, we saw a play at DC’s Studio Theater, where daughter Hannah works, called Downstate, which occupies the same type of niche as Eureka Day.

Digression: FYI, “Downstate” refers to Illinois south of Chicago, just like “upstate” refers to New York north of New York City. Maybe you already know that and this is an unnecessary digression. If so, just forget you read this digression, or just skip it all together.

Downstate, another wonderfully written play, takes place in a halfway house, in a small town somewhere in Illinois. The house is occupied by four men, each with a different story, and each accused of, and convicted of, pedophilia. The men are very different. One an elderly white man, convicted of taking advantage of two of his piano students. Two are Black men, one of whom seems to have had an underage male “lover” and the other a history with juvenile women. The fourth is Hispanic, and his case involved his own daughter. The four are, to different degrees, repentant, rebellious or forgetful of their acts. Their relationship with each other is fraught, and with their handler, a woman who works for the authorities and keeps her eyes closely on the four, is more fraught.

The house is visited by one of the white man’s former piano students who comes to demand an apology from his attacker – an apology that he himself has written, and things go quite awry.

The beauty of the play is that, while you never are tempted to forgive any of the men for what they have done, you begin to see them as something more than just criminal pedophiles. You feel for their condition, for their helplessness and their dependence on what their handler says that they can or can not do. And, although there is no doubt that the old piano teacher did molest his young students, you realize that memory can be a funny thing, as the man who has returned and written out this very detailed apology begins to question his own memory of events, a memory which he thought infallible until then.

Downstate, like Eureka Day, is probably a play that can not today be presented at the Kennedy Center. But it can be presented at a theater such as Studio. Or can it? Like most professional theaters across the country, Studio relies not only on ticket sales and philanthropic contributions, but on governmental grants, through the National Endowment for the Arts for example. Studio receives hundreds of thousands of dollars of government money. As I understand it, this year’s money will come with some conditions, some new standards that theaters have to agree to meet. This will probably exclude some plays that they would otherwise want to present, and will affect many playwrights whose productions will not be able to be shown at major theaters across the country.

And who knows where it will go from here? All because the King Donald the Abhorrent is afraid that a play will catch him. And it might.