Stevens, Roger L. (1910-1998), was an outstanding American theater producer and arts administrator. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy asked Stevens to help create a national culture center. Under Stevens’s leadership, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts was established in Washington, D.C., in 1971. Stevens served as chairman of its board of trustees from 1971 to 1988.
Stevens served as special assistant on the arts to President Lyndon B. Johnson from 1964 to 1968. In that position, he helped pass legislation that created the country’s first national organization for the arts (later the National Endowment for the Arts). Stevens served as the organization’s chairman from 1965 to 1969.
As a producer, Stevens helped present many of the most important dramas and musicals of the 1900’s. He produced or coproduced about 250 shows. Among the most significant were the dramas Bus Stop and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (both 1955), the musical West Side Story (1957), and the comedy Mary, Mary (1961). He also imported outstanding plays from Europe, including works by such dramatists as Friedrich Durrenmatt of Switzerland and Robert Bolt, Harold Pinter, and Tom Stoppard of England.
Roger Lacey Stevens was born on March 12, 1910, in Detroit. He attended the University of Michigan from 1928 to 1930. Stevens was a successful real estate broker from 1934 to 1960. His first Broadway production was a revival of William Shakespeare’s comedy Twelfth Night in 1949. Stevens died on Feb. 2, 1998.
