The $2 Million Gift That Came With Its Own Encore

When board leader James Kuhn agreed to serve another term at Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center, he described the job in plain terms: push the landmarking process through, get the expansion moving, and in his words, "bring ticket prices down to make WHBPAC more accessible to all." It reads like standard nonprofit language, the kind of quote that runs under a press photo of a ribbon-cutting. Except Kuhn isn't just the guy who signs off on capital campaigns. On August 29, he's the guy on stage.

Kuhn fronts 3 Decades Rewind, a touring tribute act built around the biggest hits of the 1970s, and the band has become one of WHBPAC's most reliable sellouts, filling the house in both 2025 and 2026 and drawing a sold-out crowd at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor along the way. So when Kuhn and his wife Marjorie announced a $2 million leadership gift to the theater in June, with the auditorium, stage, backstage areas, rehearsal spaces and administrative offices now renamed The Marjorie & James Kuhn Theatre, it wasn't a distant patron writing a check from somewhere else. It was someone who knows exactly how many seats his own name can fill, putting his money where his mic already is.

That's the part worth sitting with if you live in Westhampton Beach and have ever wondered why this particular 425-seat theater on Main Street keeps punching above its size. The people funding its future are, in more than one case, the same people the audience already came to see.

A Gift Announced on the Heels of a Bigger One

The Kuhn gift didn't arrive in isolation. It followed a $6,000,000 award from the New York State Council on the Arts toward WHBPAC's expansion, and it lands as the organization approaches its 30th anniversary, a milestone the theater is treating as a genuine inflection point rather than a marketing hook. Executive Director Julienne Penza-Boone, who joined the organization in 2008 and has led it since 2020, called the newly named space "the creative heart" of WHBPAC and framed the gift as the moment "our dream of an expanded and inclusive performing arts center is becoming a reality."

The Kuhns aren't newcomers writing their way into a naming opportunity. They've been part of the Quogue community since 1983. Marjorie chairs the Committee to Save the Dunes in Quogue and is active in fundraising causes well beyond the East End, which means this gift sits at the intersection of two things the family already does: protect the coastline they live on and keep the stage they perform on standing.

Why the Expansion Isn't Really About the Building

It would be easy to read this as a story about square footage. It isn't, entirely. Kuhn's own framing of why the expansion matters ties it directly to affordability and access, not just capacity, and to keeping WHBPAC's Arts Education programs serving nearly 10,000 students each year. The physical expansion is the mechanism. The goal, at least as the people funding it describe it, is a theater that more of the community can actually afford to walk into.

That matters for anyone who has tried to grab tickets to a marquee WHBPAC night recently and found the good seats gone within days. A 425-seat house with three tiers, Orchestra, Mezzanine, and Balcony, sells out fast when the name on the marquee is recognizable, and the theater's own guidance is blunt about it: buy directly through the box office rather than a resale site, because third-party sellers can't guarantee real seat locations or fair pricing, and WHBPAC can't help you if something goes wrong with a ticket it never issued.

What Was Actually Onstage Last Weekend

Zoom out from the gift for a moment and look at what the calendar has looked like lately, because it's a decent snapshot of why the theater needed the extra capacity in the first place. Grammy-winning trumpeter Chris Botti, who has recorded and toured with Sting, Barbra Streisand, and Lady Gaga, played WHBPAC on August 8. Comedian Nimesh Patel followed the next night. Two very different rooms, back to back, both drawing crowds to the same 76 Main Street address.

The next big date on the books is the one that closes the loop on this whole story: 3 Decades Rewind returns on August 29 for what the theater bills as a Thank You Concert, an intentionally affordable ticket as a gesture to WHBPAC's longtime supporters. It's the same band, the same board leader, the same stage he just helped rename, doing the thing that actually pays for the theater's future one ticket at a time rather than one gift at a time.

The Pattern Underneath the Press Release

None of this is unusual for a small nonprofit theater, exactly, but it's rarely this visible. Most performing arts centers separate their donor wall from their marquee. WHBPAC's version of that wall currently has a name on it that also shows up in the concert listings a few weeks later. It's a small detail, but it says something real about how this particular institution stays rooted to the village around it instead of drifting into a generic touring house that happens to be located in Westhampton Beach. The people who fund it are the people who show up for it, sometimes literally carrying the show.

If you've lived here a while, you've probably noticed this pattern in other corners of the village too: the same names on the library board and the farmers market committee, the same families who've chaired one thing and volunteered for another. WHBPAC's expansion is just the version of it with a $2 million price tag and a sold-out August date attached.

A Few Practical Notes If You're Buying Tickets This Fall

• Book directly at whbpac.org or by calling the box office at 631-288-1500. The venue has said repeatedly that this is the only way to guarantee accurate seat locations and face-value pricing.
• With only 425 seats split across three tiers, shows with a recognizable headliner tend to move quickly once they're posted, particularly anything tied to a benefit or an anniversary date.
• Keep an eye on the Arts Academy calendar alongside the Mainstage listings. The education side of the organization is explicitly part of what this expansion is meant to protect, and it runs its own separate programming throughout the year.

Westhampton Beach has always had a habit of making its civic life feel personal rather than institutional. The theater on Main Street just gave everyone a fairly literal example of what that looks like: a board leader whose name is now on the wall, whose voice will be back on the stage in a few weeks, and whose gift is aimed less at making WHBPAC bigger for its own sake than at making sure the next generation of East Enders can still afford to walk through the door.

For more on what's actually happening in Westhampton Beach, from the people who live and work here year-round, Stoebe & Co. keeps its finger on the village's pulse well beyond real estate. If you'd like the inside line on what's next, get on the VIP list.