Rep. Joyce Beatty of Ohio is asking a federal court in Washington, D.C., to force President Trump and the board and staff of the Kennedy Center to revert to calling the arts complex The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

The motion, which Beatty filed on Wednesday, asks a federal circuit court judge to reverse the Trump administration and the center’s current board and staff’s decision to call the complex “The Trump-Kennedy Center.”

In the filing, Beatty’s attorneys wrote: “Can the Board of the Kennedy Center — in direct contradiction of the governing statutes — rename this sacred memorial to John F. Kennedy after President Donald J. Trump? The answer is, unequivocally, ‘no.’ By renaming the Center — in violation of the law — Defendants have breached the terms of the trust and their most basic fiduciary obligations as trustees. Shortly after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Congress designated the Kennedy Center as the ‘sole national memorial to the late’ President in the nation’s capital.”

In a statement emailed to NPR Thursday, Roma Daravi, the vice president of public relations for the Kennedy Center, wrote: “We’re confident the court will uphold the board’s decision on the name change and the desperately needed renovations which will continue as scheduled.” NPR also reached out to the White House for comment, but did not receive a reply.

In December, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced that the complex would heretofore be called “The Trump-Kennedy Center.” Although the new moniker was never approved by Congress, the Center’s website and publicity materials were immediately updated to reflect the administration’s chosen name, and the same day as Leavitt’s announcement, Trump’s name went up on the signage of the complex’s exterior, over that of the slain President Kennedy.

Later that month, Rep. Beatty who serves as an ex-officio member of the Kennedy Center’s board of trustees, sued Trump, members of the Kennedy Center board appointed by Trump, and some ex-officio members, arguing that the complex’s name had been legislated by Congress in 1964. Wednesday’s motion is part of that lawsuit.

In a press release sent to NPR on Wednesday, Rep. Beatty said: “Donald Trump’s attempt to rename the Kennedy Center after himself is not just an act of ego. It is an attempt to subvert our Constitution and the rule of law. Congress established the Kennedy Center by law, and only Congress can change its name.”

For many patrons, artists and benefactors of the Kennedy Center, the name change was the last straw in politicizing the performing arts hub. Following the White House announcement of the new name, many prominent artists withdrew planned performances there, including the composer Philip Glass (a Kennedy Center Honors award recipient, who received his prize during the first Trump administration), the famed Broadway composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz and the 18-time Grammy-winning banjo master Béla Fleck.

The Washington National Opera (WNO), which had been in residence at the Kennedy Center since 1971, also severed its ties in January after ticket sales dropped precipitously. Earlier this month, WNO artistic director Francesca Zambello told NPR, “We did try as best as we could to encourage [the patrons] that we are a bipartisan organization, but people really voted with their feet and with their pocketbooks. And so we realized that there was really no choice for us.”

On Monday, a coalition of eight architecture and cultural groups also sued Trump and the Kennedy Center board in federal court over the complex’s scheduled closing in July for unspecified renovations. Their suit seeks to have the White House and board members comply with existing historic preservation laws, and to secure Congressional approval before moving ahead with the renovation plans.

I am blindfolded and seated in a vintage armchair set in the center of a darkened, red-lit room with Gothic accents. An actor is performing nearby. I hear their voice, but cannot, of course, see them. I suddenly spring upward in my seat, alarmed at the touch of some sort of cloth — or perhaps a feather? — across my ankles.

I’ll never be entirely sure. For wearing the small veil across my eyes was a requirement to participate in “Poe: Pulse & Pendulum,” the debut offering from new troupe Theatre Obscura L.A. The company’s initial performance contains two one-act plays, modern interpretations of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

While the stories are familiar to many, Theatre Obscura increases the levels of discomfort. In this room, I am at times unsettled, at once tracking the movements of the actors while attempting to remain hyper aware of any sudden touch or scent. “The Pit and the Pendulum,” the first half of the program, translates especially well to this setting, its dark sense of demented confinement keeping my nerves on high alert.

Conjuring such a state of anxiety was the point.

“If you take the visual away, it’s going to make you feel uneasy,” says Paul Millet, who devised the concept.

There are jump scares. Downtown event space the Count’s Den has been outfitted with about 50 speakers for the Obscura shows, which run through April 12. Some are visible before one puts on the blindfold. Many, though, are hidden under seats or couches, as the audio will trail the actors around the room, or perhaps a sudden crash or door opening will have me jolting my attention elsewhere.

“The Pit and the Pendulum” is a story of torture, and as the narrator, here played by Melissa Lugo, desperately speaks of a blade swinging above, actors will fan us, timing their waves with each swoosh of the audio. I was prepared for that one, as a fellow theatergoer nearby let out a soft yelp when the unseen gestures first arrived above their head.

For many, sight is the most coveted sense. “If you take that away, you’re already naturally uncomfortable,” Millet says. “So we lean into that. We know you’re going to be uncomfortable. We know this is not the norm. But get on that ride with us. Be willing to be uncomfortable. Discomfort, I think, helps to heighten the experience, and ideally allow it to trigger the emotional reactions that the story does.”

Still, touch is limited in the show. Occasionally a rattling of a chair, but little more. The fluttering I felt near my ankles was to mimic the sensation of a running critter. The troupe will ask for audience consent, and participants can opt out. While I went in wondering if “Poe: Pulse & Pendulum” would seek to recall more extreme haunt experiences with lengthy waivers, Millet wanted to keep it light — an audio play, primarily, with just a few in-the-flesh signals.

“We want people to feel unease, but I don’t want anyone taken out of the story because a boundary or line was crossed,” Millet says.

Scent, too, is used with restraint. There are moments when guests will get a whiff of a fragrance that pairs with the storyline. Millet considers the first run of Theatre Obscure to be an experiment in how much touch and scent audiences may want to endure. Smell, he says, is tricky, as the aroma may linger and become a distraction.

Millet has been honing the concept since 2023. Previously, he was part of the team behind Wicked Lit, which ended in 2019 after running for a number of years at unique locations such as Altadena’s Mountain View Mausoleum. Those immersive performances would feature casts and guests walking the venue. Theatre Obscura, however, is fully seated.

“Poe: Pulse & Pendulum” focuses on the fear that something may happen to us when stripped of sight.

(Joe Camareno / Theatre Obscura)

And while the stories of Poe lend themselves to the Halloween season, spooky events increasingly occur year round. Long-running production “The Willows” is set to wrap in early April, and “Monster Party,” a period piece that takes guests to a devilishly extravagant cocktail party, is re-launching in mid-April. Millet, a longtime theater producer who has a day job in television editing, is hoping to stand out by avoiding “the glut” of horror events that occur each September and October.

Theatre Obscura may face challenges, namely persuading potential guests that “The Pit and the Pendulum” is more than simply a live reading with audio effects.

“You can feel the movement of the characters around you,” Millet says. “You’re in the environment with the story as it unfolds. You can experience it on a more visceral level.”

Blindfolded, I felt Theatre Obscura was mostly playing off our fears rather than giving in to them, largely keying in on our anticipation that something may happen to us when stripped of sight. Lugo in much of “The Pit and the Pendulum” circles guests, who are seated sporadically around the room, allowing each of us to imagine how close or far we may be from the hole we are told is at its center. Each show deals with claustrophobia in some way, either of a space, or of a mind.

“The Tell-Tale Heart” is louder, more crowded. The sounds of crashing glass and creaky floorboards had my head working overtime to draw a floorplan, only to then have it distorted when actors would unexpectedly whisper in both of my ears to bring forth the protagonist’s nightmares. While I expected Theatre Obscura to be slightly more aggressive in its uses of touch and scent, it’s a show that asks us to live in our heads, and to sit in our own feeling of trepidation.

“I was intrigued,” Millet says, “with really trying to engage the audience’s imagination.”

In his second term, President Trump has ordered the removal of monuments, plaques and exhibitions related to slavery, and the history of racial injustice in the U.S. Meanwhile, human rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson has been working to ensure evidence of America’s painful past is not erased.

Stevenson’s nonprofit, the Equal Justice Initiative, opened the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Ala., in 2018, to chronicle slavery and racism in America. A new exhibit, which is both located in and called Montgomery Square, begins in 1955 with the boycott of Montgomery’s segregated buses and ends 10 years later with the marches from Selma to Montgomery for voting rights.

Stevenson describes Montgomery’s buses as “places of real peril” during Jim Crow. Black people were prohibited from sitting in the first 10 seats of the bus, which were reserved for white riders only. Additionally, Black people had to pay in the front of the bus, then go to the rear to board — hoping that the bus driver didn’t take off without them. In 1950, a Black World War II veteran named Hilliard Brooks was shot and killed by police after he argued with the driver as he attempted to board a bus.

“Black people couldn’t avoid [the buses] because they had to get to work; they had to go to the homes where they served as maids and cooks and domestic workers,” Stevenson says. “And it did make the bus this very unique space for how racial apartheid, how segregation and Jim Crow manifested in the lives of virtually every Black person in the community.”

Stevenson says he’s not trying to “punish America” by talking about slavery and lynching. Rather, he says, confronting oppression is a path toward liberation.

“There is an America that is more free — where there’s more equality, where there is more justice, where there less bigotry — and I think it’s waiting for us,” he says. “But I don’t think we can … create that America while we remain burdened by this history that too many refuse to talk about, too many refused to acknowledge.”

Stevenson is the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, which represents children and adults illegally convicted or unfairly sentenced. His 2014 memoir, Just Mercy, was adapted into a film starring Oscar-winning actor Michael B. Jordan.

Interview highlights

On meeting civil rights activists Rosa Parks and Johnnie Carr

After a couple of hours, Mrs. Parks turned to me, and she said, “OK, Bryan, tell me what you’re trying to do.” And I told her about our work trying to represent people on death row. I said, “We’re trying to challenge wrongful convictions. We’re trying to challenge this legal system that treats you better if you’re rich and guilty than if you were poor and innocent. We’re trying to represent children. We’re trying to do something about bigotry and poverty and people who are mentally ill. We’re trying to change the way we operate these jails and prisons.”

I gave her my whole rap. And when I finished, she looked at me and she said, “Mm, mm, mm, that’s going to make you tired, tired, tired!” And that’s when Ms. Carr leaned forward and she put her finger in my face. She said, “That’s why you’ve got to be brave, brave, brave.” And Ms. Parks grabbed my hand and said, “Will you be brave?” And I said, “Yes, ma’am.”

A monument in Montgomery Square pays tribute to the Black women who led the Montgomery bus boycott.

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On the march from Selma to Montgomery

We’ve been doing this project where we interview people. … Amelia Boynton Robinson was almost killed by horses and police officers. Lynda Blackmon Lowery said she got hit and she passed out. And for 40 years, she assumed that she passed out because she hit her head on the ground. And then when they uncovered documentary footage, she realized that she passed out and she was in that condition because after she fell, she was beaten by state troopers over and over again on the head. But she insisted on getting out of the hospital and being ready for the next march.

I think it’s the courage, it’s commitment, it is the tenacity, the acculturation to do things that most people would never choose to do. We recently lost Dr. Bernard Lafayette, an extraordinary leader who was tasked with organizing much of what happened in Selma. He told me, he said, “Bryan, we were prepared to die.” … And I don’t think people appreciate the extraordinary courage it took. … People were beaten and battered. And I just think to confront that kind of threat, with no protection, without an army, with no weapons, takes an extraordinary courage that I feel like we have to access again if we really want to create a more just world, and I think that’s the discovery that I’m really inspired by.

On documenting nearly 6,500 lynchings that took place in the U.S. — 2,000 more than had previously been documented 

The detailed work of going into these communities and uncovering archive references and newspaper references was something that no one had undertaken. And so we spent five years combing through these records. … We now have identified 6,500 lynchings of Black people in this country between 1865 and 1950. I do think it says something again about how we have failed to investigate this really important period of American history. …

We’ve got instances where a man was lynched because he didn’t call a police officer, “sir.” Somebody didn’t step off the sidewalk when white people walked by. A Black man went to the front door of a white person’s house, not the back door. So many people were lynched, because they passed a note. They were Black men passing notes to white women. … One Black woman in Kentucky was lynched because they couldn’t find her brother. So they used her as a proxy for this Black man who had been accused of something. And when you understand that this practice, this terror violence, was about tormenting and traumatizing and reinforcing this racial hierarchy, you begin to think of this differently.

“The monuments are at eye level, and then the ground shifts and they raise up, and you are standing underneath these six-foot, corten steel monuments that identify all of these people, and it unnerves a lot of people,” Stevenson says of the Legacy Museum’s memorial to lynching.

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On what truth and reconciliation looks like 

The first thing is that for truth and justice, truth and reconciliation, truth and restoration, truth and repair, I think the first we have to acknowledge is that those things are sequential. You can’t get the beautiful “R” words, like redemption and reconciliation and restoration and repair, unless you first tell the truth. As a lawyer, I can tell you that you’ve got to have the truth of what happened at the crime scene and the state understands this. They want to put all of the evidence in, because that’s what’s going to allow the jury to make an informed decision about culpability. And we’ve never really done that. And so I think this process of truth-telling has to shape what we do.

In South Africa, after the collapse of apartheid, they committed space for the victims of apartheid to give voice to their harm. They even created space for the perpetrators to give a voice to the regret. You go to Germany, the villain of the 20th century, and you can’t go 200 meters without seeing markers and monuments and memorials dedicated to the harm of the Holocaust. They’ve made truth-telling a necessity. No student in German can graduate without demonstrating a detailed knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust. They require it. And the result of that is that there are no Adolf Hitler statues in Berlin. There are no monuments or memorials to the Nazis. We’ve never done that in this country. In fact, we’ve done the opposite.

Monique Nazareth and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.