Degrading the Arts (Redux)

 

[On 13 August 2009, I posted “Degrading the Arts” on Rick On Theater, the first of several articles I would post on the Culture War on the arts and creative expression in the United States.  At that moment in history, it looked as if we were escaping any serious or lasting damage to the creative life of Americans, despite the efforts of the forces of repression.

[The wielders of those forces didn’t go away, of course, and they would come out to fight some more in the years to come, but there were enough supporters of free expression and the First Amendment to push back and send the would-be repressors back into their hidey holes for a time.

[But they never gave up, so I kept adding posts to ROT from time to time, railing against those who’d silence the artists, thinkers, and imaginative conceivers.  Now, however, those would-be silencers and cancelers have assaulted the high ground and may soon take it because the top official of the nation is leading them rather than just urging them on from the safety of the White House—and his minions are all falling in line behind him instead of standing against the assailants, as an effective few had done before.

[Just last week, I reposted Indira Etwaroo’s article from American Theatre, “The Arts and the Battle for the Soul of Civilization” (4 May 2025), in which I exclaimed with foreboding, “The culture war is specifically assaulting our arts institutions as surely as the Russians are assaulting Ukraine’s cities and infrastructures.”

[So, now comes Rob Weinert-Kendt, editor of American Theatre, and his colleague Daniella Ignacio, a contributing editor at AT, with a pair of reports on the latest—right up to a week or so ago—actions taken by the culture warrior-in-chief.]

“TRUMP PROPOSES ELIMINATION OF NEA AND NEH”
by Rob Weinert-Kendt

[The first of Weinert-Kendt’s reports from the culture warfront was posted on the American Theatre website on 2 May 2025]

The administration’s 2026 budget comes at a time when the future of NEA staff and grant programs remains in doubt. 

WASHINGTON, D.C.: President Trump has released a 2026 budget proposal [see “Major Discretionary Funding Changes,” the linked document, under “Small Agency Eliminations: Cuts, Reductions, and Consolidations,” pp. 39-40] which includes, among many deep cuts to federal spending, the wholesale elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts [NEA], the National Endowment for the Humanities [NEH], and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting [CPB], as well as several other federal and regional cultural agencies.

We have been here before: In 2017 and 2018, the first Trump administration released budget proposals that included the elimination of these same entities, but they were preserved thanks to the work of arts advocates and Congressional support, including elected Republicans. This time, however, with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) given free rein to scrutinize and slash federal spending and a flurry of executive orders [EO] issued by the president which target specific organizations and programs—not to mention the apparent unwillingness of Congress to contravene the President—this new threat of termination must be taken more seriously.

The NEA has largely been spared direct fire from the new administration to date, at least by contrast to the NEH, which had its staff drastically reduced and grants rescinded, and the CPB, the target of a recent executive order demanding that it stop funding PBS [Public Broadcasting Service] and NPR [National Public Radio]. The arts endowment hasn’t been entirely exempt from the new administration’s interventions: In February, new compliance guidelines appeared to require grant applicants to assent to Trump’s anti-DEI and anti-trans executive orders, and to certify that their work would not promote DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] or “gender ideology.” Both strictures were temporarily halted, the latter thanks to a lawsuit led by the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union; see below for links to additional information] (and joined by Theatre Communications Group [TCG], the publisher of this magazine), though a judge later declined to block the NEA from reimposing that requirement, instead allowing the agency’s internal process to proceed (with a deadline of April 30). At the same time, the court made clear that reimposition would likely violate the First Amendment.

The endowment met that deadline this week with an updated document signed by NEA senior adviser Mary Anne Carter [nominated on 6 May as Chairman of the agency] that seems to try to split the difference. It affirms that the president’s executive order “requires executive agencies to take all necessary steps, as permitted by law, to ensure that agency funds are not used to promote gender ideology,” adding that “the NEA will implement EO 14168 [issued on 20 January] on a grant-by-grant basis.” It takes pains to assure applicants that they “will not be required to certify that no federal funds are used to promote gender ideology,” and “that there is no eligibility bar to submitting an application related to promoting gender ideology.” They add that the agency’s long-standing criteria for applications leaves “no room for viewpoint discrimination.”

So how will the administration’s anti-trans order be enforced? While Carter’s letter reiterates the primacy of standards of “artistic merit” and “artistic excellence,” she states that in evaluating projects on a grant-by-grant basis the NEA’s chair may also take “into consideration general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs and values of the American public.”

The language about “eligibility bar,” “viewpoint discrimination,” as well as the qualification “as permitted by law,” can all be read as responses to the ACLU’s challenge, which cited in part a First Amendment objection to the implementation of the executive order. Said Lynette Labinger, cooperating attorney for the ACLU of Rhode Island, “Unless the NEA clarifies otherwise, this information does not eliminate the significant concerns addressed in our lawsuit.”

Meanwhile, rumors have been swirling for the past week that DOGE visited the NEA last week and that major staffing changes are imminent. Grantees are no less uncertain about their future: While grant recipients from last year’s first funding cycle (GAP [Grants for Arts Projects] 1) who have not yet been reimbursed are wondering when they’ll find out if their payments will come at all, applicants who received offer letters for last year’s second funding cycle (GAP 2), who would have typically received an official award by February or March, have been told their grants are still under review. Applicants for most recent current grant cycle, for which the deadline was April 7, wouldn’t normally find out results until December, but there’s nothing normal about the current moment.

The timeline so far: 

January 15: NEA grant awards for FY2025 were announced. Within the theatre category, 148 grants were awarded for a total of $3,730,000. Within musical theatre, 29 grants were awarded for a total of $930,000.

January 20: Maria Rosario Jackson stepped down as chair of the NEA [appointed by President Biden on 18 December 2021; resigned on 20 January 2025]. Mary Anne Carter, who served as chair in 2019 under the previous Trump administration, is the current senior adviser [as noted above, nominated by President Trump to be chairman]. 

February: When NEA grant details and applications for FY2026 were posted, the NEA imposed a certification requirement and funding prohibition in response to President Trump’s order prohibiting federal funding of anything that “promotes gender ideology.”

March 6: The ACLU, the ACLU of Rhode Island, David Cole, and Lynette Labinger, cooperating counsel for the ACLU-RI, filed a suit in the U.S. District Court of Rhode Island on behalf of arts organizations applying for NEA funding.

March 7: Just a day after the suit was filed, the NEA temporarily rescinded the attestation requirement and funding prohibition after the lawsuit was filed.

March 11: Original deadline for part 1 of grant applications for the upcoming cycle. 

March 14: NEA applicant portal’s extension opened. 

March 24: Original deadline for part 2 of grant applications for the upcoming cycle. 

April 4: The U.S. District Court of Rhode Island refused to block the NEA from reimposing a restriction on funding for projects deemed to promote “gender ideology,” even as they maintained that the rule likely violates the First Amendment.

April 7: Part 2 deadline closed. 

April 30: Evaluation said to have been completed. The formal notice of the Executive Order [EO 14168] was released. 

American Theatre’s coverage of the NEA in the past year is here.

[Rob Weinert-Kendt is editor-in-chief of American Theatre.  He was the founding editor-in-chief of Back Stage West and writes about theater for the New York Times, Time Out New York, and the Los Angeles Times.  He studied film at the University of Southern California and is a composer member of the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop.]

*  *  *  *
“NEA ABRUPTLY PULLS ARTS GRANTS ON A MASSIVE SCALE”
by Daniella Ignacio and Rob Weinert-Kendt

[Weinert-Kendt collaborated with writer, digital storyteller, theater artist, and musician Ignacio, who’s a colleague at American Theatre, on another report three days later on 5 May 2025.]

Arts organizations, including dozens of theatre companies, had NEA grants withdrawn or terminated late last week, and leadership resignations at the endowment bode ill.

Call it a Friday night massacre: On the evening of May 2—just hours after the Trump administration released a proposed budget [see link in above article] that would entirely eliminate [. . .] both the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), among dozens of other federal agencies—hundreds of arts organizations of all sizes and kinds across the U.S. received emails from the NEA withdrawing pending grants and terminating existing ones, in amounts ranging from $10,000 to $100,000, earmarked for production costs, educational programming, new-work development, artists’ pay, and more.

Without variation, these missives included this explanatory statement:

The NEA is updating its grantmaking policy priorities to focus funding on projects that reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the President. Consequently, we are terminating awards that fall outside these new priorities. The NEA will now prioritize projects that elevate the Nation’s HBCUs and Hispanic Serving Institutions, celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence, foster AI competency, empower houses of worship to serve communities, assist with disaster recovery, foster skilled trade jobs, make America healthy again, support the military and veterans, support Tribal communities, make the District of Columbia safe and beautiful, and support the economic development of Asian American communities. Funding is being allocated in a new direction in furtherance of the Administration’s agenda.

American Theatre heard from dozens of theatre organizations about these sudden withdrawals over the weekend, and we are gathering more information on the scale of the damage as we report (please reach out to at@tcg.org if your grant was cancelled). What seems to be the case from our reporting so far—and from that of other publications—is that these cuts were sweeping, affecting grants for everything from new-play festivals to large resident houses, from edgy alternative venues to Theatres for Young Audiences and classical theatres, without regard to mission or merit.

One telling sign that the supposed new grantmaking criteria in the boilerplate language above are likely a smokescreen for an across-the-board policy of destruction: Of 148 grants offered last fall to various theatre projects, the one that could definitely be characterized as going to a “Hispanic Serving Institution,” the Chicago Latino Theater Alliance, also received a notice last Friday rescinding a grant of $20,000 to support the next iteration of Destinos: Chicago International Latino Theater Festival.

The response from theatres—some of whom had awards withdrawn that had been offered and announced but never fully contracted, others of whom had existing grants “terminated” mid-stream, and many of whom got notices of both kinds—has been swift and strong. Portland Playhouse in Oregon, which had a $25,000 grant to support a production of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone withdrawn just 24 hours before the show’s opening night, quickly replaced that money by reaching out to donors, and today announced a new statewide GoFundMe fundraising campaign called Keep the Story Alive: Oregon Arts Rising to recover the $590,000 in NEA grants lost in total by all Oregon arts organizations, and to distribute those funds evenly across the affected groups.

“This is about more than a show,” said Portland Playhouse artistic director Brian Weaver. “It’s about what happens when we stand together to say what we’ve always known to be true: The arts are kept alive by the community that surrounds them; we will not let our stages go quiet.” He concluded, “Let’s show the nation what happens when Oregon refuses to stay silent, and let’s remind them that the arts are worth fighting for.”

In yet more distressing news, today the NEA’s 10 remaining directors of disciplines—i.e., the heads of different grant categories—announced that they had accepted offers to “leave the agency through the Deferred Resignation Program or, if eligible, retirement,” to quote the resignation letter from Greg Reiner, who has headed the theatre and musical theatre disciplines since July 2015. He wrote: “It is with a mix of sadness and pride that I share the news today that my 10 years at the NEA will come to a close on May 30 . . . [.] Serving you all through my work here has been the honor of a lifetime. Seeing firsthand the power of theatre to transform lives for the better through the work you are doing across our nation has been a privilege and an inspiration.” He indicated that theatre specialists Ouida Maedel and Ian-Julian Williams would remain on staff.

Other reports have indicated that the endowment is facing a 50 percent staff reduction overall. How the NEA will continue to function and administer and distribute any grants going forward remains to be seen. The endowment’s FY25 budget is $210 million—roughly .0031 percent of the federal budget.

Shock and Loss

Meanwhile, stories from theatres who’ve had awards withdrawn and/or terminated have poured in. Jesse Berger at New York City’s classics-oriented Red Bull Theater said the $20,000 hole left in their budget was “sadly not a surprise given what this administration has been doing for the last 100 days. It’s a lot like The Government Inspector, but not funny.”

[For the theatrically deprived reader, the reference to The Government Inspector is to an 1836 farce (also known as The Inspector General) by Nikolai Gogol (Russian; 1809-52) in which a poor, minor civil servant is mistaken by the buffoonish officials of a provincial town for a government inspector who’s come to investigate the corruption in the town. They all fawn on the clerk to prevent him from discovering their malfeasance, and he encourages this. His deception is only revealed after he’s left town and the real inspector arrives.]

Another NYC-based theatre, National Queer Theater, reported a canceled grant of $20,000, with artistic director Adam Odsess-Rubin commenting, “Artistic censorship is a horrible feeling. I hope every theatre company and artist in the country fights this injustice.”

Playwright Beto O’Byrne’s company Radical Evolution [Brooklyn, NY; nb: the linked AT article on Meropi Peponides, cofounder of Radical Evolution, contains a link to the theater’s website] was set to develop its first Off-Broadway commission with an NEA grant of $50,000, also rescinded. “Whether or not that commission continues is in serious jeopardy,” said O’Byrne.

In the Bay Area, San Francisco International Arts Festival, New Conservatory Theatre Center [San Francisco], American Conservatory Theater [San Francisco], and TheatreWorks Silicon Valley [Palo Alto] were among the orgs that lost grants. TheatreWorks Silicon Valley artistic director Giovanna Sardelli reported the withdrawal of a $10,000 grant to support the company’s Core Writers Group, which consists of emerging and seasoned Bay Area theatre writers, including 2025 Tony nominee Jonathan Spector [Eureka Day (2024); Best Revival of a Play]. “It is disheartening and infuriating that vibrant artistic voices are being sidelined due to funding that we are told is now ‘being allocated in a new direction in furtherance of the administration’s agenda,’” Sardelli said.

Said playwright Elisa Bocanegra [nb: this AT article on and by Bocanegra contains a link to the Hero Theatre, which she founded], whose L.A.-based company Hero Theatre lost not one but two grants, “While I wasn’t surprised, I’m hurt. . . [.] I run a mission-driven theatre that services women and children in shelters, and artists who have been (beyond) harmed by working in American theatre. I created an environmental initiative to help educate and heal. Wow, this hurts.”

On social media, playwright Patrick Gabridge commented that new-play development got “a kick in the teeth” from Friday’s NEA grant decisions, citing funds taken from Seven Devils Playwrights Conference [McCall, Idaho], the New Harmony Project [New Harmony and Indianapolis, Indiana], and the Great Plains Theatre Commons (GPTC [Omaha, Nebraska]). “Not a shock, but it still hurts. So many didn’t make it through the pandemic, and now this.”

Indeed, GPTC received its rescission message just weeks away from its annual New Play Festival, to be held May 25-31. The company had already been spending funds with a reasonable expectation of reimbursement on a $35,000 award that was announced in January, and in normal times would have reached them by February or March.

“The NEA withdrawal of funding to arts organizations across the country is devastating on many levels for the organizations affected and the communities they serve, but it’s also another step in our deepening national crisis,” GPTC artistic director Kevin Lawler said in a statement. 

In the D.C. area, theatres and artists confirmed to have been notified that they lost NEA funding included Mosaic Theatre Company [Washington], Round House Theatre [Bethesda, Maryland], Signature Theatre (though it already received its funding for its production of In The Heights when they received the notification [this Arlington, Virginia, company shouldn’t be confused with the Signature Theatre Company, an Off-Broadway troupe located in New York City]), the IN Series [Washington] for its production of Ethiopia, Atlas Arts Lab [Washington], Chesapeake Shakespeare Company (CSC) [Baltimore], and Julianne Brienza, the founder of D.C.’s Capital Fringe.

Chesapeake Shakespeare Company (CSC), was also hit with a loss close to showtime, in their case $50,000 for the company’s Shakespeare Beyond touring shows, which they offered for free to more than 8,000 people in a dozen Maryland neighborhoods last year. Though the company had already decided not to apply for the same grant for 2026, CSC founding artistic director Ian Gallanar said that CSC was “obviously saddened by the NEA’s decision. Right now, we are scrambling to hold our 2025 summer season together, and figuring out where to go from here.”

Creede Repertory Theatre of Colorado has been receiving grants from the NEA since 1974, which have helped the small theatre in a “tiny frontier town” of 400 residents build educational touring programs for rural and remote communities. Artistic director Emily Van Fleet reported that the $20,000 grant to support its Headwaters New Play Program was withdrawn. The program commissions, develops, and produces new American plays and amplifies the voices and culture of the San Luis Valley of Colorado and the rural Southwestern U.S. for audiences of all ages. With or without NEA funding, Van Fleet said, “We will continue this vital work.” 

In Atlanta, True Colors Theatre Company had a $25,000 grant rescinded for the production of a new bilingual play by Darrel Alejandro Holnes. They also have $43,000 still remaining to be paid (out of a $75,000 total award), which was to be distributed for reimbursement for a new-work development program for Black theatres across the country. 

At the Classical Theatre of Harlem, the NEA unexpectedly rescinded critical funding for CTH’s upcoming summer production, the East Coast premiere of Will Power’s Memnon. This puts at risk not only free public performances that reach more than 30,000 audience members annually, but also hundreds of jobs for artists, crew, and local vendors, and an estimated $600,000 in economic impact for Harlem. The company has launched an emergency fundraising appeal and invited the public to join its “Hold ’Em in Harlem” annual gala fundraiser at the Renaissance Harlem Hotel Ballroom on May 22.

“This isn’t just a line item—it’s a devastating blow to the working artists, small businesses, and Harlem families who count on this production every year,” producing artistic director Ty Jones said in a statement. “This is a fight for cultural equity, artistic freedom, and the soul of Uptown.”

For NYC’s Public Theater, the loss of funds for programming at Joe’s Pub and for free Shakespeare programs like the Mobile Unit and Public Works “isn’t the end of the world,” conceded executive director Patrick Willingham, given the theatre’s budget size. But he knows that for many smaller companies, and for the field at large, the “downstream philanthropic danger is as bad as this rescission,” particularly for organizations that rely on matching private funds with public money.

More importantly, Willingham takes seriously what the cutting of funding for the arts “says about our country, and the value of a healthy democracy. This is actually at the core of who we are, and the signal this sends—we should actually be quite frightened. At least until this moment, there has been a federal commitment to support the arts; it has been shaken and tested in the last few decades, but there was at least an understanding that funding the arts and the humanities is crucial to our democracy. I’m not making this up—that’s in the language of how the NEA was created.” This attack on that fundamental principle, he said, “is more than a shot across the bow—it’s a torpedo into the engine room.” 

Some companies have lost grants that had already been reduced from earlier expectations. Jenni Werner, artistic director of the New Harmony Project in New Harmony, Indiana, said that the company applied for funding for their annual writers residency, which takes 25 writers to New Harmony for a 10-day residency, as well as for an annual play festival [PlayFest Indy] that they run in Indianapolis. When they were offered $40,000, Werner said they decided “to reduce the residency, which is what we have gotten funding from the NEA for decades,” and to significantly reduce the fall festival. “NEA staff urged us to make that simplification and to focus on one project.” 

They’re still going forward with the residency in a couple of weeks. “We’re not cancelling it,” said Werner, who admitted she hasn’t been expecting to receive the money since Trump’s inauguration and has been seeking alternative funding sources. Still, the way last week’s sudden cancellation was handled “seems like an insult,” she said.

At New Paradigm Theatre (NPT) in [Stamford] Connecticut, funds for a new production of Hairspray were withdrawn, leaving them in need of an additional $10,000 and making this year’s gala, themed as a “Live Taping of the Corny Collins Show,” hit harder. NPT artistic director Kristin Huffman called the funding loss “a gut punch. Our production costs exceed $62,000, and this gala is our main fundraising event. We hope our supporters and newcomers to NPT will recognize the importance of our work and join us for an enjoyable evening.”

There have also been international ripples. [Melbourne] Australian theatre company Fairly Lucid Productions was preparing to board Fiji Airways Flight 870 to travel to and perform Ben Noble’s play Member (about the murders of gay men, including UC Berkeley student Scott Johnson, in Sydney, Australia, in the 1970s and ’80s) at the San Francisco International Arts Festival this week [8-11 May], when they discovered that the NEA had pulled a $20,000 grant the endowment had promised to fund their performance as part of the festival. The grant was first offered last November—and then pulled in the middle of the two-week festival that it was awarded to support.

Festival director Andrew Wood struck a defiant note in a statement. “Trump will not stop us,” he said. “The festival is happening and we are moving forward regardless. Everyone has their visas and their plane tickets; they are coming here to join us and the show will go on.”

Wood zoomed out to add, “Our grant is just a very small part of a much bigger overall picture. What Project 2025 imagines is a gutting of this country’s democratic institutions and the First Amendment rights that go with them. They have chosen to attack the arts community as one way to achieve this. But they have made a big mistake. We will coordinate with other sectors and fight back—and we will win.”

Advocacy efforts thus far are focusing not only fundraising but on challenging the withdrawals of the funds on legal and procedural grounds. Those who received termination notices were given seven days to appeal the decision (not seven business days, just seven days, which included last weekend). Advocates are encouraging those impacted to appeal and to file the final financial report by the noted deadline, as termination letters noted failure to do so “may result in your organization being ineligible for future National Endowment for the Arts funding opportunities.”

[TCG hosted a 90-minute webinar on these developments on Thursday, May 8, at 1 p.m. ET.  (This event has passed and I don’t know if there’s a recording of it that’s accessible.  If any reader is interested, I suggest contacting TCG for information: 520 Eighth Avenue Floor 20, Suite 2000, New York, NY 10018-4156; telephone: 1-212-609-5900; e-mail: info@tcg.org.)] 

*  *  *  *
“TRUMP’S ‘NEW PRIORITIES’: BAY AREA ARTS GROUPS
STUNNED BY NEA GRANT CANCELLATIONS”
by Aidin Vaziri

[In an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, posted on the website on 3 May 2025 and updated 4 May, Bay Area journalist Aidin Vaziri gives a sampling of how the Trump administration’s actions and proposals are affecting regional arts organizations, including regional theater companies.   

[These are real-world people, workers in the field of the arts and consumers of their product, not bureaucrats and administrators in Washington.  What these folks are experiencing is the same thing artists and art consumers are experiencing in Atlanta, Houston, Seattle, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and Boston.]

Several Bay Area arts organizations were blindsided after the National Endowment for the Arts abruptly rescinded their federal grants, part of a broader Trump administration overhaul of federal arts policy that has upended cultural institutions nationwide.

Many arts nonprofits in the region, including San Francisco’s New Conservatory Theatre Center, the Oakland Theater Project and Circo Zero [San Francisco], received termination notices Friday stating their projects no longer aligned with the administration’s newly defined priorities.

Among the other casualties: Frameline [San Francisco], which has produced the annual San Francisco International LGBTQ+ Film Festival for 49 years, and the San Francisco International Arts Festival, which lost its NEA funding while it was in the middle of a two-week program the grant supported. 

The NEA emails cited a pivot toward funding projects that “reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the President,” including efforts to celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence, foster AI competency, support military veterans and empower houses of worship.

“Consequently, we are terminating awards that fall outside these new priorities,” the letter stated.

Projects focused on underserved communities or diversity in the arts, once a central pillar of NEA funding, are now excluded.

The New Conservatory Theatre Center received notice that its $20,000 grant for the world premiere of “Simple Mexican Pleasures” has been rescinded. 

In the message addressed to Executive Director Barbara Hodgen, the NEA cited a shift in agency priorities under the Trump administration, stating that the project no longer aligns with new funding goals.

Circo Zero, a dance organization that promotes BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and People of Color] and LGBTQ participation in technical theater roles, saw its $50,000 NEA grant halted. Artistic Director Keith Hennessy said the group had already spent much of the money and is awaiting a final reimbursement. 

“Some of us are halfway through a project and have already been partially reimbursed,” Hennessy said in an email to the Chronicle. “Some were awarded money, signed contracts, and committed to many artists and staff, but have not started it yet, so this announcement is more of a ‘pulling the rug out,’ destabilizing their upcoming production.”

The effort to defund identity-centered arts groups “is nothing short of an attempt to censor our art, control our history, and erase our lived experiences,” said Allegra Madsen, executive director of Frameline, which will hold its 49th annual LGBTQ+ film festival in June despite losing its $20,000 NEA grant.

“We remain committed to uplifting queer and trans artists and their stories,” Madsen said. “More than ever, our whole community needs to show up and support each other.”

The NEA rescinded funding for Opera Parallèle’s upcoming “Harvey Milk Reimagined,” which honors one of the nation’s foremost LGBTQ+ leaders [composer: Stewart Wallace; librettist: Michael Korie; 31 May, 1, 6, 7 June], six months after sending a congratulatory letter on the production, said Elizabeth Brodersen, interim managing director of the San Francisco company.

[Harvey Milk (1930-78) became in 1978 the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California, serving on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for 11 months before being assassinated on 27 November 1978 by fellow Supervisor Dan White (1946-85), along with then-Mayor George Moscone (1929-78), at San Francisco City Hall. The tragic opera celebrates Milk’s enduring legacy and contributions to the nascent LGBTQ movement, his early life in New York, and relocation to San Francisco. The opera has been revised for OP into two acts instead of three, with new music and a smaller cast from its original Houston Grand Opera première in 1995 and San Francisco Opera début in 1996.]

“This reversal undermines the NEA’s standing as an arbiter of artistic excellence,” Brodersen said.

A $20,000 NEA grant to the San Francisco International Arts Festival was also canceled, just as Australian theater company Fairly Lucid Productions was preparing to fly to the city under the funding for a performance starting Thursday.

“Trump will not stop us,” Executive Director Andrew Wood said in an email about the festival, which is running through Sunday. “The festival is happening and we are moving forward regardless. Everyone has their visas and their plane tickets and, in the same manner as Fairly Lucid Productions, they are coming here to join us and the show will go on.”

The San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, which plans a concert next Saturday [10 May] at Brava Theater, lost a $20,000 NEA award, according to Executive Director Richard Aldag.

“The loss of $20K is a major fiscal blow to our organization,” Aldag said in an email to the Chronicle. “We need to let our community know what’s going on in D.C.”

Circus Bella of San Francisco also lost its $30,000 grant for the summer season of Circus in the Parks, which is free to the public. 

The Oakland Theater Project had been awarded $30,000 for the 2026 world premiere of “Moby Dick,” by playwright Erik Ehn. Managing Director Colin Mandlin said the company has received only half the funds, adding that plans for the production may need to be scaled back.

Meanwhile, Danielle Grant, director of programs at SCRAP, San Francisco’s creative reuse depot, lost a $25,000 grant intended to fund sustainable fashion workshops for underserved youth.

“We don’t fit any of those ‘new priorities,’” Grant told KQED.

The NEA confirmed that projects outside the administration’s new focus areas are being terminated effective May 31. Organizations have until June 30 to request final payments for completed work. Appeals must be filed within seven days.

Uncertainty looms for organizations with pending NEA applications. 

Andrew Smith, executive director of the Lab in San Francisco, said his organization anticipated the shift and moved NEA-funded programming forward to ensure reimbursement. But like many in the region, he’s uncertain about future support.

The upheaval extends beyond the NEA. 

Last month, the National Endowment for the Humanities began informing state humanities councils and grantees that their funding was also being terminated immediately. 

In some cases, notices were sent from a Department of Government Efficiency email address and signed by NEH acting chairman Michael McDonald. 

“Your grant’s immediate termination is necessary to safeguard the interests of the federal government, including its fiscal priorities,” the letters said. “The termination of your grant represents an urgent priority for the administration, and due to exceptional circumstances, adherence to the traditional notification process is not possible.”

The NEH, whose $207 million annual budget is distributed largely through state agencies, had awarded $22.6 million in grants just six days before President Donald Trump returned to office. 

Those included funding for regional museum exhibitions, inclusive historical programming and local cultural preservation initiatives — many of which have now been nullified. 

California Humanities, which had regranted NEH funds to several Bay Area groups, is among the affected.

These sweeping changes follow Trump’s earlier efforts to shutter the NEH, NEA and Institute of Museum and Library Services entirely. 

The administration has also pressured the Smithsonian Institution to alter museum programming, purged political opponents from the Kennedy Center board, and launched a crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives across federally funded cultural institutions.

Warren Pederson contributed to this report.

[Aidin Vaziri is a staff writer at the San Francisco Chronicle.  He produces news, health, and entertainment stories for San Francisco’s major daily newspaper.  He’s also written for Rolling Stone, National Geographic, MTV, Amazon, E! Networks, and other outlets.

[I wrote up top that I’ve written or reposted several articles on ROT that concerned the support, funding, or teaching of the arts,  I think this is a sufficiently important topic, especially just now—as I think the pieces I’ve posted above will attest—that I should list the ones I’ve published on this blog over the last 16 years.  The list is fairly long, but I’ll append the entire list here.

[First, I want to single out two oldies that bear on the subject.  In their own ways, these are both extraordinary essays, and I think worth taking a look at now, one 61 years after it was published in Commentary, a monthly magazine on religion, Judaism, Israel, and politics, as well as social and cultural issues; the other only 35 years since publication in The Nation.

[Paul Goodman’s “‘Observations: A New Deal for the Arts’” (posted here on 18 September 2019), is surprising because Goodman (1911-72) was a committed libertarian and radical, but he was opposed to state-supported art.  He explains why in his article for Commentary of January 1964.  (As I note in my introduction to the posting, the essay was written before the National Endowment for the Arts was created in 1965, though it was being discussed.)  Goodman, by the way, was a great friend and supporter of the radical and experimental Living Theatre.

[“‘Arts and the State’” by Paul Mattick, Jr., was published in The Nation, a progressive monthly magazine that covers political and cultural news, opinion, and analysis, on 1 October 1990.  I reposted it on ROT on 14 November 2021.  Mattick (1904-81) was a Marxist writer, political philosopher, and social revolutionary, who blamed the right-wing politicians for waging the culture war of the Reagan-Bush I-Bush II era.

[The rest of the pertinent posts on my list are all contemporary.  Some I wrote, while others are reposts.  (Some of the titles here include more than one article.)

“Degrading the Arts,” 13 August 2009

“The First Amendment & The Arts,” 8 May 2010

“‘The Arts Are Under Attack (Again!)’” by Paul Molloy, 22 May 2011

“‘Are the Arts a Luxury?’” by K. C. Boyle, 29 January 2012

“‘Don’t Sit Back – Push Back’” by Paul Molloy, 1 June 2012

“‘Flaunting The Spirit Of Support For The Arts’” by James R. Oestreich, 30 May 2013

“Culture War,” 6 February 2014

“The First Amendment & The Arts, Redux,” 13 February 2015

“‘A History of the National Endowment for the Arts,” 5, 8, 11, 14, 17, 20, 30 November, 3, 13, 16, and 19 December 2023

“‘The Courage to Produce: A Conversation on High School Censorship’” by Allison Considine, Jessica Lit, Jordan Stovall, and Nadine Smith, 21 April 2024

“America’s Culture War—Now at Your Local Theater” by Cristina Pla-Guzman and Daniel Blank, 25 October 2024

“‘The Arts And The Battle For The Soul Of Civilization’” by Dr. Indira Etwaroo, 4 May 2025

 

[It’s a somewhat daunting list, I guess.  Of course, I assembled it over the course of 16 years, as I said.  Besides, it’s an enduring issue, and it’s just heating up again.  There may yet be several more Rick On Theater posts to add.]

"If You Rebuild It, Will They Return?": Regional Theaters Struggle to Revive

by Rob Weinert-Kendt 

A Supplement to the Regional Theater Series

[Rob Weinert-Kendt’s report on the difficulties faced by America’s regional theaters to come back from the COVID shutdown was published on the American Theatre website on 20 March 2023 (AMERICAN THEATRE | If You Rebuild It, Will They Return?; nb: the online edition has hyperlinks to many of the topics and references in the article).  It’s the latest installment in Rick On Theater’s occasional series on the state of the non-profit theater sector in the United States.

[I’ve published several articles concerning the state and background of the regional theater in the United States, starting with “A Crisis In America’s Theaters” on ROT on 13 September 2023.  That post was followed by “The Regional Theater: Change or Die” on 3 October 2023 and “Regional Theater: History” on 8 October.  These articles reported on the declining prospects of the regional theater in the United States.

[I then posted a serialized history of the National Endowment for the Arts (in 11 parts, 5 November-10 December 2023) because the NEA was instrumental in the development of the modern non-profit theater in the U.S.  The plight of this segment of our theater is serious enough that I’ve continued to post on it from various perspectives to demonstrate the history and importance of the American regional theater system and to explain the situation that put U.S. theater, as it’s now constituted, in peril.  Below is my fifth post in this irregular series.]

3 years after shutdown, despite some encouraging signs, most U.S. theatres are struggling to get audiences to commit.

It is perhaps a dubious sign of progress that the third anniversary of the COVID shutdown—which in the theatre field is marked as beginning March 12, 2020, the night Broadway went dark, along with most live performance venues across the U.S.—passed fairly quietly a week ago. [ROT’s coverage of the COVID shutdown is catalogued in the afterword to “‘Audiences Are Back, More or Less’” (Rick On Theater: "Audiences Are Back, More or Less"), 18 March 2024.] While we can’t say we are in a post-pandemic world as long as the virus’s daily death count remains in the hundreds and COVID safety advisors remain on theatres’ payrolls, we are, for better or worse, in a post-pandemic posture as a society. Federal relief money, including the Payroll Protection Program (PPP [3 April 2020-31 May 2021]) and the Shuttered Venues Operating Grant (SVOG [1 March 2020-30 June 2021]), which helped theatres keep many employees on payroll and maintain their operations over more than two years, has evaporated, and nearly all theatres, commercial and nonprofit alike, have lifted mask mandates, let alone vaccine requirements.

Indeed, things seem almost . . . normal again at many theatres. But are they? For the vast majority of theatres, the 2022-23 season we’re currently in the midst of is as close to a full return to live, in-person programming as they’ve managed since the COVID shutdown. And that’s a step forward, after many theatres’ plans for the 2021-22 season were scotched by the deadly Omicron [a variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19] wave of fall 2021 and winter 2022 (though Broadway got through a season of plays and musicals, and a fairly interesting one at that). But you don’t have to look far for signs of attrition: When, last fall [September 2022], American Theatre published its first full season preview of TCG member theatres’ programming since fall 2019, the overall quantity of shows submitted for our listings was down more than 40 percent from pre-pandemic levels. It might at least be considered a triumph that most of the shows announced in that issue did make it to the stage, with only a smattering of cancellations and reshufflings, but it’s also clearly an era of diminished expectations.

The more pressing question, now that theatres are back in some kind of business, is: How is business? Are audiences coming back at anything like pre-pandemic levels? And are theatres able to make ends meet? The evidence is mixed, and seems to vary by region, with reports from some theatres in Great Lakes states, including Milwaukee Rep and Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, that subscription levels have held firm and may even be on the rise. Others have reported heartening bumps in single-ticket sales, particularly for last year’s holiday offerings, even as subscriptions have slumped. Broadway League president Charlotte St. Martin [St. Martin retired in February 2024] recently reported that Main Stem houses are filling 88 percent of their seats.

Some see these bright spots as leading indicators, but it might [be] more accurate to view them as outliers. The theatre administrators and researchers I spoke to, many of whom shared both hard figures and anecdata with me, told me that audiences and income are down from pre-pandemic levels by anywhere from 20 to 50 percent. That’s a wide chasm, over which the fortunes of America’s theatre industry may hang in the balance.

It’s not that trendlines are all heading in the wrong direction. According to Jill Robinson, CEO & owner of TRG Arts, which collects data on performing arts organizations in the U.S. and U.K., the gap is closing. Using 2019 as a pre-pandemic benchmark, TRG data shows June 2022 theatres reporting admissions down by 51 percent from 2019 levels, and income down by 50 percent. By December 2022, those numbers had shrunk to 33 and 35, respectively.

The issue is the pace of improvement.

“It has been coming back since about May 2021 . . . slowly,” said Zannie Voss, director of SMU DataArts, which gathered data from 200-plus performing arts organizations through 2022. “The question mark now is when is it going to plateau, or is it going to continue to slowly rebuild to earlier levels? That remains to be seen.”

Another rising trend line that is more concerning, but which speaks to theatres’ preparation for the worst: Data collected by Theatre Communications Group, the publisher of American Theatre, shows a sharp increase in the number of theatres projecting deficits into their budgets: While for fiscal year 2021, just 10 percent of theatres projected deficits, for fiscal year 2023 that number is 60 percent.

“Overall, I think 99 percent of us are back now only because of the federal funds that we received, the extraordinary fundraising we did, the generosity of our communities, and decisions that are a bit of a slippery slope, like additional draws from an endowment,” said Jennifer Bielstein, executive director of San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater, whose current budget is around $22 million. “The key thing to me is that we need more runway. It was assumed by all of us that federal funds would be what we needed to get back fully, but we’re seeing that it is a much slower return and rebuild with a lot of our theatres across the country.” That’s why, she said, ACT is planning with a longer recovery in mind. After a long practice of making mostly three-year contingency plans, she said, “Starting with next fiscal year ’24, we’re looking five years out, thinking that it could take that length of time to get back to where we were.”

Chandra Stephens-Albright, managing director at Atlanta’s True Colors Theatre, is also taking the long view.

“Everyone thought we were crazy when we did our strategic plan in 2020, but it has really helped us stay focused,” said Stephens-Albright, who like many theatre leaders reported a big drop in subscriptions, only partly offset by single-ticket spikes. A focus on the theatre’s mission—to support new work and education, as part of the larger aim of remaining a leading Black theatre in the U.S.—has provided a guiding light through a financially precarious time in which cash flow must be managed “very, very carefully” and seven-show performance weeks have been scaled back to five.

That strategic focus has also created some opportunities. “There’s been some spotlight on how small organizations, Black organizations, have been under-resourced,” she said. “That has got some attention, and it’s opened some doors for us to tell our story—doors that weren’t open before. That’s a positive; it isn’t enough to get us back to where we were pre-pandemic, but it certainly does make more people aware of our work and help advance our strategic objective.”

Greg Reiner, who heads the theatre and musical theatre programs for the National Endowment for the Arts [see the above-referenced 11-part ROT post], pointed to similarly encouraging signs of new participation. Though general relief funds for the field have dried up, the NEA, which just approved its highest level of appropriations ever, did pump $135 million of American Rescue Plan funding through state, regional, and local arts agencies, in addition to its direct grants to arts organizations, and that seed work is bearing fruit. As a result of what he called “a really broad engagement plan,” the endowment is “reaching folks that weren’t even applying to us before. We’ve brought in new, smaller organizations that are now applying through our regular granting programs.”

The NEA’s purview includes a lot of programming outside the realm of traditional, proscenium-based theatre, including work in correctional facilities and educational theatre. Another non-traditional area that has seen growth, according to Alan Brown of the WolfBrown arts consultancy firm, is immersive, virtual, and augmented theatre. But even when he shows theatres research showing that audiences are increasingly less willing to shell out for live, in-person theatre—a pre-pandemic trend that has only accelerated—he said he meets resistance.

“The public has embraced immersive experiences, and commercial producers are running away with millions of dollars in demand for them. That’s not only going to grow—it’s going to explode over the coming years,” Brown said, citing not only the aesthetic possibilities of this technology but also its utility in closed-captioning and enhanced accessibility. “What are nonprofit theatres going to do? Are they going to say, ‘We don’t do that; we’re about a live, authentic experience,’ or are they going to say, ‘Maybe we should figure out if we have a role to play in augmented, immersive, and virtual reality experience’? The theatre field is is pretty progressive compared to the other fields; there’s a good deal of innovative work going on. But you have artistic directors who still want to do important theatrical work on their mainstages for an audience of critics. When I start breathing fire about immersive experiences, I just get blank stares.”

For some theatres, doubling down on the live theatre experience still makes business sense, even after the stress of the pandemic. Milwaukee Rep, for instance, went into its cancelled 2020-21 season with a subscriber base of 16,000; that dropped off to [14,500] in the following year, according to managing director Chad Bauman, but has turned back around. When subscription numbers are tallied next fall, Bauman said he expects the count for the 2023-24 season to surpass pre-pandemic levels.

Milwaukee Rep has done all this without reducing the number of performances, opening last fall with a large-cast musical, Titanic [book by Peter Stone, music and lyrics by Maury Yeston; 20 September-23 October 2023], and running 11 productions since. Like many of its peers, the Rep had projected a deficit for this year, but, said Bauman, “It looks like we’re going to have a break-even budget, because our ticket sales have far outpaced our projections. Next year, we have a $15 million budget, and we don’t anticipate any extraordinary fundraising needs.”

His colleague at ACT, Jennifer Bielstein, told me she wondered if the success story in Milwaukee has something to do with how early in the pandemic that theatre was able to reopen—that is, comparatively earlier than theatres in the Bay Area or New York City. Bauman said that the Rep followed the advice of the Medical College of Wisconsin, and that a member of their board, who is the team doctor of the Milwaukee Bucks and Brewers, “had access to all the protocols that professional sports were going through, and if you remember, sports came back way ahead of everybody else. We were watching what they were doing and how it was working. They were basically testing a lot, creating bubbles, creating all these different protocols.”

Ultimately, though, Equity protocols won out, leading Milwaukee Rep, like many large U.S. theatres, including ACT, to cancel some or all of its 2021-22 season. Perhaps more importantly, Bauman noted that Milwaukee Rep was fully ready to reopen when they had the greenlight. They’d kept 80 percent of their staff on payroll, Bauman said, figuring that if they’d laid off staff, they “would leave Wisconsin, and we would never be able to attract that talent back.”

Bauman gives some credence to the early-reopening theory, noting that many performing arts organizations in the South never really shut down at all, and many in the Midwest were similarly unfazed. “Those that reopened faster, and were allowed to do so by their communities, which historically were in the Midwest and the South, are in a much healthier spot today,” he concluded. “I believe that’s because the longer we were closed down, the more out of sight, out of mind we were, people forgot about us and got addicted to Netflix, and it’s harder to get them off their couch.”

Danny Williams, managing director at Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, seconded the sense that the pandemic shattered some folks’ longtime consumption habits.

“Since we’ve come back, we have seen a decline in subscriptions of around 60 percent,” said Williams, who added that single-ticket sales have been strong for such recent production as Dominique Morisseau’s Confederates [11 February-5 March 2023] and A Christmas Carol [adapted by stage and artistic director (Hartford Stage, 1998-2011) Michael Wilson; 20 November-30 December 2022]. He attributed the drop-off to a number of factors: “One is the pandemic breaking the cycle of people just renewing; it just was something that you did—you got your letter in the mail and you sent in your money and you picked your dates. I think the other is that the demographics have changed; there are folks who are aging out of going to the theatre, and the new folks who are joining us aren’t necessarily the ones looking for a subscription. Folks younger than 50 or so definitely are not looking to drop a couple of $100 at once to commit to a season worth of plays. They want to see what they want when they want to see it.”

This change has been a major focus of WolfBrown’s research. Said Alan Brown, “I think COVID accelerated macro trends that existed well before the pandemic—shifts in public tastes and in consumer behavior, like late planning behavior. People can’t make up their minds that they’re gonna go out, often until the last minute now, and that’s wreaking havoc on marketing. People’s lives are more complicated. I don’t think that’s changing. I think that’s more or less a permanent condition. So do we fight that and keep trying to get people to buy in advance, or do we offer a late buyers’ club?”

Jamie Alexander, director of the consulting team at the firm JCA Arts Marketing, has tracked a similar crash in subscriptions, noting that among all performing arts organizations, theatres have been both hardest hit by the dropoff and the most adventurous in trying new substitutes. She pointed to membership options like Steppenwolf’s [Chicago] Black Card, Woolly Mammoth’s [Washington, D.C.] Golden Ticket, and ZACH Theatre’s [Austin, Texas] Zach XP, as well as tech-enabled opportunities for “cross-media loyalty programs.”

“Our study shows that there’s definitely growth in the people and number of organizations that are doing those sorts of programs, and there’s growth in those programs,” said Alexander. “I mean, it’s tepid—it’s not the runaway hit that subscriptions once were. But it’s something that’s growing as opposed to shrinking.”

SMU DataArts’s Zannie Voss, whose studies have shown, among other things, a troubling drop-off in corporate support for the arts, also sounded a cautionary note about plans to simply refill theatre seats. The urgency around getting people to return defines the problem the wrong way; in that framing, she said, “The organization is meeting its own need, its own desire to produce work they need people to come see, rather than thinking about, is the work that you’re doing super relevant to the community you’re serving? If it’s a community of artists you’re serving, if that’s your reason for being—great. But a profound sense of relevance is critical at a time like this.”

JCA’s Alexander concurred. “The thing I always say is, just talk to the community. What do they want, not just artistically—what do they want? What is going to speak to them? What will they pay for? Doing the research is really important. I feel like often people will just be like, ‘Oh, let’s just do a new flex package,’ and they haven’t figured out if there’s good evidence or data to promote that, and then they just waste money on promoting it.”

The challenge of marketing individual shows while also creating loyalty and awareness among theatregoers takes constant, even granular attention. Said Stephens-Albright, “We had stopped doing direct mail, but we started doing direct mail again—but very targeted. Now we do direct mail within a two-mile radius of the theatre, because heat maps tell us that people come from a certain set of zip codes.” She said she also focuses on “identifying people that are specific ambassadors, like, ‘I need you to go after these: These are your folks, go get them.’”

Zooming out, the theatres that have fared best, according to TRG’s Jill Robinson, are the ones that were not only aggressive about fundraising but about programming, despite the pandemic—the ones who said, as she put it, “‘We’re going to get back to business as soon as we can—we’re going to be outdoors, we’re going to do it digitally. We’re going to do everything we can to get back going.’ The companies that did that are in the strongest position, because they have databases that are more active, they have staff teams that have not lost momentum and skill. They have the best likelihood of heading into 2024 and ’25 feeling like they’ve got the furnace and the fuel.” Those organizations also were more likely to do what she calls “both-and programming—both programming in ways they know audiences will come back to in volume, as well as things they know that people who really love theatre will show up for, and that they know missionally they want to do for their community.”

Alan Brown is less sanguine.

“It’s curious—what made us so resilient is also what’s making us slow to change,” he said. Looking back on past three years, he marveled, “People doubled down and worked unbelievably long hours, boards of directors came together and worked together like never before, and people homed in on their core work. They didn’t have to think about innovation and new products. They could just focus in—and nearly everyone survived.” But with relief money dried up, the reality of producing again in a changed world is bringing some theatres up short. Brown offered this analogy, “What do you call it when you’re driving on the highway, on mountainous terrain, and they have those escape routes for trucks that can’t go up? We’re on one of those.” Now that the rubber is hitting the road, so to speak, Brown warned, “I think the other shoe has not yet dropped, and it’s about to. There’s going to be a lot of painful downsizing and potentially more paradigmatic change.”

The pain may be unwelcome, but change is not. The NEA’s Reiner, citing the endowment’s current chair, Maria Rosario Jackson, said, “Dr. Jackson has been talking about resisting the instinct to just snap back to the way it was before. There’s an opportunity here for a new reality. The arts ecosystem is demanding new ways of working, new ways of gauging success and progress. So there’s an opportunity here to take stock and figure out what we’ve learned, and to reimagine how we work, to move on from past practices, because a lot of those practices weren’t working before the pandemic. What are the opportunities to make arts participation more relevant and accessible and equitable?”

I asked most of my interviewees about their level of optimism for the field; most were upbeat, relatively speaking, and seemed as eager to face current challenges as they were clear-eyed about the scale of them. True Colors’ Stephens-Albright put it best.

“I’m not nervous and panicked,” she said. “You can’t be nervous and panicked and work in theatre, especially if you got through 2020.” But, succinctly summing up the field’s next mandate, she concluded, “We’re gonna have to change our tactics.”

[Rob Weinert-Kendt (he/him) is editor-in-chief of American Theatre.

[In the American Theatre issue for Spring 2024, there are two articles pertinent to this examination: “Wish You Were Here: A Radical Access Roundtable,” moderated by Gabriela Furtado Coutinho, in which access consultants and artists discuss how they create sensory-conscious shows for disabled folks and their families, as well as how radical inclusivity enhances theater for everyone, and “Subscriptions Are Dead. Long Live Subscriptions!” by Rosie Brownlow-Calkin, where theater leaders talk about what’s working and what’s not in their efforts to change theatergoers’ ticket-buying habits. 

[The contents of these AT articles are very pertinent to the thrust of my Regional Theater Series.  I may, therefore, republish them on Rick On Theater in the coming weeks or months.  (The issue isn’t currently available online.)]