By George

Thank you, Jeffrey Sweet, for the terrific remembrance of George C. White. It fittingly captured his charm, vision, and pragmatic generosity.

I met George when he directed the premiere of my play More Fun Than Bowling in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1986. I was enthralled with him immediately: his stories, his dapper clothes, the people he knew and places he had been—not to mention his knowledge of wine. He told me I should come to the O’Neill Playwrights Conference. I told him I had applied every year and had never been accepted. He said: “What are you doing in May?” 

And so, the following May (well before the conference started), he put me up in the “main house” at the O’Neill for 10 days. A lovely room to write in, a cafeteria to eat in, and virtually no one around at all. A perfect writing retreat. George also handed me the key to Eugene O’Neill’s house, saying: “My advice, Dietz, is don’t go there at night.” That night, as I stepped over the creaky floorboards in the darkened house, I understood George’s warning. I briefly sat at a small table, planning to do a little writing in the creaky, claustrophobic home of the famous man…but soon, convinced I heard Mary Tyrone moaning upstairs, I hightailed it out of there…arriving at what I was told was Eugene O’Neill’s regular bar. I fared better there.

Soon thereafter, the O’Neill announced that for the first time it was charging $10 (I believe) as an application fee for its conference. Armed with all the self-righteous hubris of a young playwright, I immediately fired off a letter to Lloyd Richards and his staff, decrying this punitive change in policy. I did not hear back from Mr. Richards. Instead I heard back from George. On a fine piece of stationery, his hand-written letter to me read simply: “Don’t worry, Dietz. I just gave Lloyd your 10 bucks.”

Steven Dietz
Playwright/director

Kennedy Center and Its Discontents

Thank you, Nathan Pugh, both for your work inside the Kennedy Center and for this message from the outside (“Why I Left the Kennedy Center”). Thank you for telling your story. It does what all good art does: Makes the individual universal. You’ve taken care to discuss the nuance of what has happened at the Kennedy Center in a way that paints an accurate, though agonizing, picture of the situation we all found ourselves in. I think this piece can speak for all of us as a result, though I agree that we need to each tell our own story.

It has been my honor to both work with and serve the extraordinary workers at the Kennedy Center, especially through my role in organizing Kennedy Center United Arts Workers. There are no easy answers or quick fixes to this situation. If there were, we wouldn’t be here. You know this about me, but I will say it here for context: I changed my career to work in the arts because I believe deeply in the power of the arts and I think it matters who does the work to make them happen. The impact I hope my career has had when it is over is to have pushed the performing arts into a more democratic and participatory existence. I believe the work I did in dance programming at the Kennedy Center was allowing me to have that type of impact.

While some people may have had to leave the Center for very legitimate reasons this year, I found it did not yet need to be me. I believe I was able to continue doing the work I went there to do, though in a very different way than I had anticipated. Organizing a union of arts administrators in these conditions has been hopeful and rewarding. The labor movement is the backbone of the American workforce, and it is the backbone of the arts, too. Expanding its reach to include arts administrators is important work perhaps most especially in the wake of an unprecedented, hostile takeover like the one we experienced. Because we believed that the institution of the Kennedy Center matters a great deal, we have inspired other arts workers to join the democratic project of the labor movement along with us. In this way, I think we may have actually defied the current leadership’s hope for complete control of the narrative of what has been happening at the Center.

KCUAW has had additional positive impacts from the inside that are invisible to those not involved in the details. Maybe most important of all, we have contributed to a situation where the complete takeover of the Kennedy Center has been and will continue to be difficult and slow for Ric Grenell and his lackeys. What we need more of is time, and I think it matters a lot that we’ve created this advantage.

Since my dismissal from my job at the Center, I’ve filled my time trying to organize my community in support of the unionizing workers at the Kennedy Center through a group called Hands Off the Arts. We have staged protests and gathered the labor community to the cause of KCUAW. My hope is that we continue to expand the reach to include cultural workers across the DMV, giving them a platform to speak out against censorship and the takeover of our institutions that were created to serve the people, not the powerful. What you say is right: The voices of the ordinary workers are missing from the conversation. I want to make sure that is not how this story ends. I look forward to being a part of the bright, full future of the performing arts in our region with you—most hopefully including the Kennedy Center one day.

Take care and godspeed. I am so proud of you for writing this piece. I hope it is the beginning of many to come.

Mallory Miller
Washington, D.C.

I have the utmost respect for the people who have chosen to leave, and even more for those who choose, at great personal risk, to be public witnesses to this decimation of freedom of expression. It’s the middle managers—men and women with children and mortgages—who have the most to lose. I don’t worry so much for the top leaders; other institutions will and have snapped them up. Thank you for your courage. I hope you have landed on your feet.

The preemptive compliance by too many people and institutions has astonished and angered me. “Suppose simply keeping still means you manage until the end,” sings Fräulein Schneider in Cabaret. That is a strategy that allows these anti-democratic leaders to prevail. You have answered the question of “What Would You Do” in the most noble way possible.

Margot H Knight
Seattle