Blocked from a two-year renovation shutdown, trustees will consider a documentary closure in which only the paperwork goes dark
After a judge blocked a two-year shutdown, the Kennedy Center board will vote on a documentary closure that keeps performances running while every official record insists the building is dark. Staff would usher audiences through a facility that exists only as a site awaiting its own return. It is the renovation as paperwork, and the sequel nobody asked the interval drinks to sit out.
The Kennedy Center's board is expected to vote this week on whether to proceed with a two-year closure so carefully drafted that the concert halls will remain lit, the box office will remain open, and every official calendar will record, with the calm of a death notice, that the building has been shut for renovations.
A federal judge recently blocked a two-year shutdown for renovations, a development that returned the matter to the board and, in further accounts of the same agenda, left trustees hunting for a verdict that satisfies both a court order and a construction timetable. Officials are calling the alternative a documentary closure. The halls would continue to host performances. Ushers would continue to tear tickets. The institution would, on letterhead, grant applications and visitor maps, exist only as a site awaiting its own return.
"The public will still be able to attend The Magic Flute," said Marjorie Vellum, the Center's newly appointed director of Documentary Reality. "They will simply be attending it inside a closed facility. We have taken legal advice. The building is not required to cooperate with its own status."
Percival Hague, vice-chair of the Subcommittee on Contingent Existence, described the scheme as a courtesy to the judiciary.
The court said we may not close. It did not say we must remain, in the philosophical sense, open.
Nina Colonnade, shop steward for the ushers, called the plan the first renovation in American history that will be performed entirely by adjectives. Staff, she said, had been issued new badges identifying them as residual personnel of a non-operating campus and instructed to answer all wayfinding questions with a single sentence: "You are not here, but the cloakroom is to your left."
Visitors, under the draft protocol, would be admitted as consultants to a future reopening. Programmes would carry a banner declaring the evening cancelled, followed by the running order. Gift-shop snow globes of the building would be sold with a printed disclaimer that the object inside no longer exists in law. The National Symphony would play as scheduled, credited in the notes as a memory of itself.
History, as ever, declines to take notes. Cultural capitals have spent half a century closing opera houses to save opera and museums to protect the collection; this is merely the version in which nobody has to miss the interval drinks. If the board approves the measure, the Kennedy Center will spend two years as the most thoroughly attended closed building in Washington, a sequel so faithful to the original that even the court may feel obliged to applaud before reminding everyone that the house, on paper, is empty.
