“To illustrate the historical gravity of the moment, actors Billy Porter, Griffin Dunne and Sam Waterston delivered a dramatic reading of the House Un-American Activities Committee testimony of Paul Robeson, the pioneering Black singer and activist whose career was decimated by 1950s McCarthyism.

“Waterston, who appeared in the film The Killing Fields and the TV series The Newsroom, told the gathering: “What’s happening here at the Kennedy Center is not a culture war sideshow. As it says in the anti-authoritarian playbook, before the camps, before the purges, before the marches, there is a theatre going dark. The gallery closed, the comedian silenced, the musician banned. This is not coincidence. The assault on artistic expression in America is central to the authoritarian project.””