Willkommen? NOT. What Won't Be Playing Ric's Kennedy Center

'Angels in America'

Arguably the greatest American play of the second half of the 20th century, Tony Kushner's two-part, eight-and-a-half-hour drama offers a searing portrait of New Yorkers struggling with the AIDS epidemic during the mid-1980s, one of whom – lawyer Roy Cohn – was Donald Trump's lawyer prior to his death from the virus in 1986. Kushner's visionary work, which travels from the hospital rooms of the inflicted to Heaven, never minces words in saying who the heroes and villains (need I say the Reagan Administration) were in the way America dealt with the crisis. Its scathing portrait of Cohn is reason enough for Ric to keep it off the Kennedy Center roster as not to infuriate his boss; but there's also Kushner's use of drag throughout that would also damn it from a Kennedy Center stage. Though as recently as 2018 a celebrated revival, from London, played the complex.

'I Am My Own Wife'

Wearing a string of pearls and a simple black frock, actor Jefferson Mays became German antiquarian Charlotte von Mahlsdorf in Doug Wright's Pulitzer Prize-winning one-hander back in 2003. Taken from interviews Wright had with Charlotte, it weaves a mesmerizing story of this trans icon who killed her father, and survived both the Nazis and the Communists in her Berlin home-turned-museum. The play was developed with Moisés Kaufman and his Tectonic Theater Project, with Kaufman acting as director. Mays won a Tony award for playing some 30-characters, and his performance was filmed for PBS. He also toured in the show that played the Kennedy Center in 2004; But don't expect Charlotte and her fabulist story-telling to return there any time soon with any other actor in the role.