Kennedy Center's Reach - Compounding the Failure

The Kennedy Center is an embodiment of the disconnect between the rich and the other Americans. Perched on a plinth overlooking the Potomac River, the Watergate complex and the Saudi Embassy, and encircled by highways, the original building is as separated from the rest of the city as if it were on an island. With a grand staircase leading up to it, the gleaming white marble facade and gilded pillars, it could be a temple, a shining city on the hill or just a mirage, visible, but hard to reach. Its $250-million new expansion project, dubbed the Reach, aims to change that.  

View of the Kennedy Center from the south lawn, featuring Joel Shapiro sculpture Blue

The Kennedy Center has always felt more like a mausoleum to the 35th American president than the nation's center for the performing arts, which it purports to be. For years its managers, the board and the wealthy donors have struggled to bring it to life, attract people of every walk of life and dispel its image as an institution for the elites. They have staged musicals such as Maleficent and Aladdin, free Messiah sing-alongs, New Year's balls and exhibits. They created the Millennium Stage - a program of free performances by never-before-heard-of artists on two stages, each at one end of a huge hallway outside the three main performance halls. And now the Reach, which promises even more variety.

The annex is a bit of an architectural wonder with its three super-modern pavilions scattered over a smallish lawn, landscaped with indigenous grasses and a rectangular pond. A bridge running across Rock Creek Parkway connects the Reach with the river-bank promenade. There is also a video wall for future, presumably free shows. The tree moderate size buildings -  Welcome Pavilion, Skylight Pavilion and River Pavilion - contain surprisingly many large rehearsal and conference rooms, theaters and halls, because the structures spread into the ground. Huge widows and glass walls ensure they get enough light.

To introduce the "historic" expansion to the public, the Kennedy Center staged a two-week opening festival with free events. A visit required an online reservation and a timed-entry pass. I was not planning to go, but while looking for some ballet tickets, I ran into the page for the Reach passes and decided on the spur of the moment to go with a friend since the passes were - surprisingly -available. They did come with a warning that "all performances and events are first-come, first-served general admission until venue capacity has been reached." 

As it happened, last Thursday morning there were no lines. In fact there was no one. The organizers clearly expected crowds because there were two cordoned lanes leading to four or five gates with metal-detectors, controlling the access to the Reach area. One of the guards at the start of a lane looked at our printed passes and sent us back into the main building where, he said, we needed to sign up for real passes. We returned to the Kennedy Center entrance, bewildered and nor really clear what to look for, but a girl in a red T-shirt came up, checked our home-printed passes and said they were valid. We just needed to go out and stand in line, she explained. "What line?" we asked, "there are no lines. There are no people." She insisted that the empty lanes were lines and after some back and forth we got past the guards, through the metal detectors and to the door of the first new building. 

Kennedy Center's Reach expansion on the south lawn

A person at the door said we had to sign up for a 3-D presentation and wait. I thought we would be shown a 20-30-minutes introductory video with information about the project and its purpose. Instead, we were ushered into a room with round tables and swivel chairs, each equipped with three gadgets: a 3-D virtual reality headset, headphones and a remote control. While struggling to hold on to the two wiggly pieces on my head with one hand, I was feeling my lap for the remote control with the other to start one of the six video clips. Managed to play a clip from the Lion King musical, a very grainy one, but still providing a good glimpse into what seems to be a fun production. The next piece, a ballet from Sweden, freaked me out with its Lilliputian-size 3-D dancers who seemed to be emerging from under my feet. Skipping to the next video proved impossible before finishing the one you started (Honey, you can't get the desert before you finish your broccoli!) Just as I pulled the gadgets off my head in frustration, my fried did the same and said, "I am ready to go when you are."

3-D gadgetry at the Reach opening festival

Outside the gadgetry room, a KC employee or volunteer asked about our impressions. We said the video was grainy, the gadgets didn't work well and we still were not clear what the project was about. She launched into a speech about connecting with the community, making art accessible, reaching out to people instead of asking them to come in, and the usual spiel spewed by promoters of newly opened art institutions. But the lady showed us around the building and gave some orientation, however meager it may have been. Most of the rooms deep below us were empty except for a presentation to a group of students that we could see but not hear through a glass wall. One room contained electronic drawing booths that project images of drawings made in them on a big wall. Something kids might like to do.

Rich annex pavilions are mostly under ground.

From that building we proceeded through a lovely open space, along the pond to the next, smaller pavilion that houses a snack shop and a conference room where several chefs were conducting a workshop. It was probably one of the festival events that we were not guaranteed an entry to. On the way, we looked back on the original Kennedy Center to see newly installed Joel Shapiro's sculpture Blue, a gift from the artist.

The most prominent indoor piece of art was a video screen displaying the names of the donors - one percent of the one percenters. A leaflet picked up at the entrance showed there were other pieces of art, most of them on loan, such as Roy Lichtenstein's Brushstroke. A lengthy piece of canvas hanging in one room, which I had thought was a used drop cloth, turned out to be a piece of art by someone named Sam Gilliam.


Bridge connecting KC's Reach annex with Potomac River promenade.

I thought the bridge was a good idea, but wondered whether anyone could come up from the riverside promenade, considering how heavily guarded the main entrance to the annex was. We did not check. On that gorgeous Thursday morning the two 99-percenters decided to descend from the shining city on the hill into the plebeian valley below to enjoy a much better espresso in a more relaxed milieu.

I am not sure how soon I'll return to the Reach (what a weird name!). The place is gorgeous but not inviting, especially not with metal detectors and (as I discovered the next day), security guards at the entrance to the bridge. Nothing I've learned about the Reach concept, or a lack thereof, during this first visit looked promising. I would not be surprised if the project turned out to be a variation of the Millennium Stage, which for me only means having to elbow my way into a performance hall through the foyer filled with psychedelic-rock and flying-dancer crowds. 

The Reach concept is not well defined

I blame much of it on Placido Domingo. Everybody is ganging up on him these days, why shouldn't I. Not that he has ever harassed me, or anything. But he had a downtown Woodward and Lothrope building handed to him on a platter in the late 1990s to turn it into an opera house. The conversion was estimated at a little over $100 million and the city fathers' arms were twisted to grant a zoning permit. And then Domingo went and made a deal with the Kennedy Center to stay with them, and the building was sold to someone else. I wanted to howl. Now, instead of hopping on the metro that would take me straight into the opera house, I have to schlep across the wasteland between the George Washington Hospital, the Watergate and the avenues converging at Juarez Memorial, and fight the vagaries of Washington's weather.

It was another thing in the 1970s when most people lived in the suburbs and Washington DC had no night life. You could park anywhere. When I first visited the city in 1978, my hosts took me to see the musical Annie at the National Theater on Pennsylvania Avenue. We drove into the city from Annandale, Virginia, parked on the almost empty street right outside the theater (no meters, of course) and when we got out, the place was dark and deserted except for the patrons exiting the theater. Today, no one could pay me to drive through any part of Washington D.C. on Saturday, least of all Pennsylvania Avenue.

The Kennedy Center, with its expensive parking and a free but infrequent shuttle from and to the metro is not a place where people want to converge without a compelling reason. The only nearby restaurant is a pizzeria-café at the Watergate. The KC cafeteria is an elevator-ride away on the roof terrace and always crowded. The full-service upscale restaurant on the same floor is too expensive for most patrons. The market-style stalls in the main foyer sell sandwiches, brownies and beverages that have to be consumed on your feet or, if the weather permits, outside on the riverside terrace, which has only recently got some tables and chairs.

So I can't help but think that all the money squandered on keeping the Kennedy Center alive could have been better spent on making a new performing art complex from scratch, in a more accessible part of town, where it could attract other businesses and art groups, and infuse new life into a larger area. I do have faith in our one-percenters though: as they accumulate wealth, they'll need new screens and walls to display their names and maybe, just maybe, they'll sponsor a better project, like the donor of the Woodward and Lothrope building wanted to. Let's just hope another recipient will seize the opportunity.

Tristan und Isolde by Mariusz Treliński

Mariusz Treliński was movie-star good looking when I met him in the Kennedy Center foyer ahead of his first U.S. appearance in 2001. The acclaimed Polish film director had attracted the attention of then-Washington Opera director Placido Domingo with his innovative production of Puccini's Madama Butterfly in Poland and Domingo invited him to stage it in the U.S. That event changed Treliński's life forever. Since then he has directed operas in several major U.S. cities, and many others in various countries. His operatic journey has culminated with the production of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde for the opening of the Metropolitan Opera's new season.

Treliński's Butterfly was the first truly exciting opera production I had seen in Washington and, I thought, one with uniquely central European uncluttered esthetic. Although it is my least favorite opera, that one production of it remains memorable thanks to Treliński's genius.

In our interview that October of 2001, he told me (surprise, surprise) that the role of the opera director today is to make an old art form attractive to contemporary audiences, while retaining the original spirit of the work. He achieved that by making simple effects highly symbolic. Instead of recreating the early 20th century Nagasaki, he used lights to create images of shimmering water, boats silhouetted against the setting sun, the flow of Butterfly's blood. There were very few props. The stage was almost always bare, but never less than striking.

In a hitherto uncustomary prologue to the opening scene, three Polish mimes tiptoed over the dark and silent stage making grand theatrical movements at a slow pace as if performing some macabre dance. One of them slashed the air with a long knife. It was clear from their ominous expressions there will be no happy ending to the story.

The mimes reappeared throughout the opera in different roles - as servants, thieves, ghosts or spirits depicting Butterfly's moods - their movements and expressions reminiscent of the traditional Japanese kabuki theater. Similarly, Goro moved around the stage in bows and squats like an oversized sneaky cat with gestures and facial expressions that conveyed his shrewd and manipulative character better than words.

In the last highly symbolic scene the sky turned bright orange-red due to the eclipse of the sun. For Butterfly, the sun was gone with Pinkerton, said Treliński. "Butterfly sacrificed everything for the man she loved because she saw him as God. And that was her sin," he said. "Her excessive love for a man violated the first of the Ten Commandments."

The success of that production was such that Treliński got invited to return to Washington with his next creative endeavor, Andrea Chenier - also a very symbolic rendition, but in my view less focused and less memorable than his Butterfly. From the first act showing the nobility wrapped up in their cocoons (which I liked), the scene changed to something like an American country fair (which I didn't like), and the rest I forgot.

Treliński reappeared in the U.S. a few years later with productions of La Bohème and Don Giovanni that were not well received, and then I heard nothing of him, until he reappeared in New York in last season's spell-binding Met productions of Iolanta and Bluebird's Castle. The double bill performance made it crystal clear that during a decade and a half since his Butterfly in Washington, the Polish director had moved on. In his hands and Anna Netrebko's interpretation, the usually kitschy and pathetic princess Iolanta became a passionate young girl striving for independence and awareness. But it was in Bluebird's Castle, that Trelinski and his designer Boris Kudlička really outdid themselves. The double bill production was described as film noir, and seeing it in a movie theater as I did, was probably more impressive than seeing the live performance on account of the copious use of cinematic effects. Treliński believes that fairy tales always contain deeper levels and he is a master of unveiling them. He said he wanted the fairy-tale women to become real - the characters we can identify with. Both pieces were spectacularly successful, although for me Bluebird remains especially unique and unforgettable. It created a sense for the audience of being in a nightmare together with the performers. 

No wonder the Met snatched the talented Pole again for this season and this time with an offer he could not refuse. What can be more flattering for an opera director than an  invitation to present his vision of Tristan und Isolde and in no less than one of the world's top opera houses.

Photo: Ken Howard for the MetropolitanOpera

This time around the reviews were not unanimously complimentary. Some critics thought the modern warship setting and various video projections were unnecessary and distracting. One reviewer particularly hated references to Tristan's early loss of parents. None of this bothered me. I found Trelinski's contemporary setting as acceptable as any, and in an opera without too much action, an occasional appearance of Tristan's father's ghost, or some image from his childhood did not take away anything from the beauty of the music or from the central theme. The military costumes were not a novelty either. In fact, I was surprised to find this production of Wagner's work a lot less revolutionary than expected from such an innovator as Trelinski.

Still, his interpretation did reveal at least one new layer of Tristan for me. While for years I watched the opera as a great love story, this Saturday at a movie theater I saw it for the first time as an opera about death. Partly, it must have been due to the dark setting which highlighted all the talk about hating daylight and embracing night, and seeking relief in the blackness of the netherworld. But I am sure the shift in my perception was a great deal due to the protagonists who in this performance were anything but lovers. I have never been Nina Stemme's fan and no amount of imagination or goodwill on my part could turn Stuart Skelton into Tristan. To make matters worse, there was zero chemistry between the two. The only interpreters worth sitting through four hours of this opera were Ekaterina Gubanova, a convincing and lovable Brangäne - the best I've ever seen - and René Pape as dignified King Marke. Gubanova also never looked better. Neil Cooper's Melot was noteworthy, although less so.

Tristan und Isolde may be about death, but it is still primarily about star-crossed lovers - definitely not about their companions and relatives, and so despite Trelinski's effort and overall decent singing, this production fell flat.