The archives at the Kennedy Center and the National Theatre are a mess
Programs from past performances are among the archived material at the National Theatre. By Nelson Pressley Nelson Pressley Theater critic Email Bio Follow April 19 at 8:00 AM Washington’s National Theatre has been in business since 1835, yet its archives are largely stuffed into a single small dressing room on the fourth floor. The collection, with playbills and photographs that in some cases are more than a century old, looks like family junk piled in an extra bedroom.
The disorganization is more grandiose at the Kennedy Center, with everything from memos, contracts and letters to original building plans and backstage photos stashed in halls, offices and closets throughout the arts complex. Most dramatic is the cold concrete room in the underground parking garage, where the largest batch of material languishes . Behind a locked steel door sits row after long row of shelved cartons.
Edwin Fontánez, the arts center’s archival photo coordinator, tracks some of it. In his basement office, he pulls out photos of first lady Betty Ford with “Fiddler on the Roof” star Zero Mostel, among other artifacts. On the box tier lobby of the Opera House, near the water fountain, Andrews and Fontánez unlock the door to a room maybe 10 by 10 feet, with a ceiling 15 feet high.
Recognizing the problem, the center just hired archivist Sofia Becerra-Licha, associate director of the archives at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, to start work at the end of the month. A five-year lease has been signed on 1,600 feet of office space in the Watergate complex next door, where Becerra-Licha and yet-to-be-hired assistants will have room to work.
“It was a way you were living the history of your organization,” Rutter says. “It infused how you think that you’re creating history today.” Where the KC Jazz Club is now in the Terrace Gallery, the Kennedy Center once maintained a performing arts library — not to rival the one in the Library of Congress, but an organized catalogue nonetheless. That’s another idea on the table. “We need to figure out to what degree is it public facing, and what format do we provide,” Rutter says, “and to what degree is it just for our own resources.”
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