The Epic of Bidenwulf

A Satirical Play in Five Acts

In the Old English epic Beowulf, a monster called Grendel terrorizes a great hall with noise and violence. When Grendel is defeated, his Mother emerges from beneath a lake — quieter, more dangerous, and far harder to kill.

On March 13, 2026, Trump fired Richard Grenell as head of the Kennedy Center and replaced him with the building’s vice president of facilities operations, ahead of a two-year renovation that will shut the institution down entirely.

The Epic of Bidenwulf maps these events onto Beowulf. Grenell becomes Grendel — the loud, combative loyalist who arrives with a sledgehammer and discovers too late that noise was never the point.

What follows is a five-act descent from noise into something worse than noise — and a final act that asks whether music needs a building at all.

It is a play about how authoritarian systems replace noise with infrastructure, and what survives when they do. I offer this production as a depiction of the mechanics behind the authoritarian machine.

The Epic Of Bidenwulf

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