By Jason Loewith, artistic director of Olney Theatre Center and Theatre Washington board chair
[Editor’s note: Introducing a Theatre Washington event on Monday, February 10, 2025, honoring 2025 Victor Shargai Leadership Award recipient Gregg Henry, Jason Loewith had this to say.]
“If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, makes him aware that our Nation falls short of its highest potential. I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist.”
So said President John F. Kennedy in October 1963.
Allow me a moment to try to kick one elephant right out of this room, at least for tonight. I refer, of course, to the outrageous news we heard on Friday regarding President Trump’s plans for our region’s greatest performing arts venue. It is both a great irony and an act of justice that we gather, three days later, to bestow our most distinguished honor on a man many of you have called the heart and soul of the Kennedy Center. And that this award salutes — and demands — leadership in our community.
How will we respond? What will I do, what will Theatre Washington do, and what will each of you do in the fight for our country’s artistic soul? The actions we take must be bold but must be collective: our strength is in our unity of purpose, and that strength is right here in this room. So let tonight’s Victor Shargai Leadership Awards be a call to action for each of us; let us open ourselves to hear the urgent demand that we become even stronger leaders to demonstrate that what we do is the bedrock of our culture. Remember that politics follows where culture leads, and not the other way around, and that’s why what we do is essential. “We must never forget,” JFK said, “that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.”
Another truth I can tell you right now: Olney Theatre Center will be doubling down on drag shows.
But we diminish ourselves and those efforts if we let tonight’s ceremony be anything other than what it’s intended to be. So, join me in taking a collective breath…. and welcome to the Victor Shargai Leadership Awards.
As most of you know, Victor Shargai’s name has long been synonymous with theater in Washington, DC (and of course, its highly influential suburbs!). Through his tenure on various theater Boards, his longtime chairmanship of Theatre Washington, and the role he played in championing the Helen Hayes Awards, Victor’s efforts helped to transform our region from a performing arts backwater to one of the world’s great theater destinations. All his high-profile, highwire acts — raising money, charming politicians, connecting influential people to institutions, hosting celebrity-filled birthday parties for Helen Hayes, and bringing his charismatic panache to every event he attended — could not overshadow the motivation behind it all: he loved artists. What they did, how they did it, and what they stood for. When he died five years ago, each of us felt his profound loss, and all of us grieved.
“Who will be the next Victor Shargai?” his widower, Craig Pascal, asked me last week. There will never be another Victor, but inspiring the next generation of leaders in our community was Craig’s mission in generously funding, and creating with Theatre Washington, the Victor Shargai Leadership Awards. Past honorees Edgar Dobie, Paige Hernandez, and Rebecca Medrano exemplify the best of us: how we nourish each other artistically, how we include every voice on our stages and every community in our theaters, and how we bring to life new, invigorating, and inspiring ideas.
Tonight’s honoree provides a beautiful counterpoint to their leadership. It’s my personal and professional honor to tell you briefly about Gregg Henry.
Literally hundreds of thousands of early-career artists know Gregg as artistic director of the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival, which serves as our industry’s most visible and impactful bridge between the undergraduate and professional worlds. How many of you here know Gregg from KCACTF? How many of you know him through his careful and caring leadership of the Page-to-Stage New Play Festival? Or through one of the Kennedy Center’s Kenan Fellowships designed to launch early-career directors and designers?
I know him best through the MFA Playwrights Program we developed with him when I was at the National New Play Network — a program that introduced graduate playwrights to professional teams of actors and creatives. In fact, it was thanks to that program that I got to know and produce Andrew Hinderaker’s Colossal in my first season at Olney, a play that rightfully went on to win the Charles MacArthur Award for Outstanding New Play and launched the career of a young trans director named Will Davis. Through that program, I knew Gregg as a tireless advocate for learning through doing, a leader stubborn in defense of his vision, yet humble before the artists he served and the colleagues with whom he collaborated. I know Gregg as a visionary, as a producer, and as an artist to emulate.
In any year, at any moment, Gregg’s passion for our community’s artists, and his dedication to the generation of theatermakers who will follow, would make him an ideal recipient of the Victor Shargai Leadership Award. But at this moment, we lift up both him and ourselves in bestowing this award today, to the man who is the soul of the Kennedy Center, and who exemplifies that President’s great commitment to artists as bridge builders, and grief-healers, and truth-tellers.