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.]

America's Culture War—Now at Your Local Theater

 
“WHEN THE ARTS BECOME A PARTISAN ISSUE,
WE ALL LOSE”
by Cristina Pla-Guzman

[Cristina Pla-Guzman’s “When the Arts Become a Partisan Issue, We All Lose” was posted on American Theatre’s website on 20 August 2024.  It didn’t appear in the magazine’s print edition.] 

Gov. Ron DeSantis’s veto of all arts and cultural funding in Florida is a crushing blow—and an opportunity to organize.

In June, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis [b. 1978; Republican Governor of Florida: 2019-Present] vetoed $32 million allocated for arts and cultural grants. It is a significant financial blow to arts nonprofits across the state. Each year, organizations are required to submit annual applications for vetting to Florida’s Division of Arts & Culture (FDAC [part of the Florida Department of State whose mission is to support and promote arts and culture in the state]) and could qualify for up to $150,000 in grants. This year, the FDAC recommended about $77 million toward 864 grants, but lawmakers approved $32 million. That was the earthquake, but then the aftershock happened when DeSantis vetoed arts funding altogether [on 12 June 2024]. 

[According to the Palm Beach Daily News, “On June 12, DeSantis vetoed all $32 million in arts and culture grants from a budget of $117 billion. His message included self-serving statements about ‘insulating Florida from malign actions of the Chinese Communist Party’ and much back-patting about spending less money than last year, but nothing about why such a small part (less than .03%) of the budget should be subject to elimination.”]

Jennifer Jones, president and CEO of the Florida Cultural Alliance (FCA [not-for-profit arts advocacy organization]), provides a critical perspective on the situation. Established in 1985, the FCA is a key advocate for arts and culture funding in the state. The organization works to ensure that grants from the FDAC are sustained and effectively distributed. Jones notes that the $32 million cut has a broader economic impact than might initially be evident. Among the cultural entities affected by the veto are zoos, botanical gardens, community theatres, and professional opera companies. Each of these organizations plays a unique role in Florida’s cultural ecosystem. For instance, Pérez Art Museum Miami, the city’s premier art museum, lost $70,500 in funding. Further, many grants serve as matching funds, essential for securing additional financial support from other sources. Losing state funding can result in a multiplied financial shortfall, where a $1 reduction in state support can translate into a $2 or more loss when considering the leveraged impact on other funding sources. 

Many fear this move is a reflection of broader political trends that threaten cultural expression in Florida. Yet the fight for the arts in Florida is far from over. 

Already Tight

For organizations that were already struggling to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic, like City Theatre in Miami, the funding cut translates into operational challenges and potential reductions in programming. Said artistic director Margaret Ledford, “We’re dealing wit h a shortfall in our current fiscal year, which will likely force us to cut back on free programming and possibly let go of staff.” This sentiment is echoed across the sector, where organizations are bracing for the financial strain of diminished resources.

Miami New Drama, operating from the historic Colony Theatre on Miami Beach, faces its own set of challenges. Said artistic director Michel Hausmann, “We had already prepared for a 50 percent cut in funding, which was tough enough. But the veto, which meant losing an additional $75,000, really complicates things for us. This amount represents significant portions of our budget, including the salary of a staff member or a third of our education budget.”

[The founder of Miami New Drama is Moisés Kaufman, founding artistic director of the Tectonic Theatre Project, who often showcases his works at MND. He did so with Here There Are Blueberries, his 2018 documentary play, and MND features prominently throughout my five-part post on that play, published on 26 and 29 May, and 1, 4, and 7 June 2024.]

While the veto did not directly affect Juggerknot Theatre Company, known for its immersive productions that celebrate Miami’s diverse neighborhoods, the loss represents a significant challenge for the tiny but mighty theatre company, which had applied for a 2025-26 grant in the next cycle. Due to the current situation, Tanya Bravo, Juggerknot Theatre Company’s founder and executive director, described the moment as one of uncertainty.

[Immersive theater is a theatrical experience that involves the audience as active participants, rather than passive spectators. It’s a sensory experience that blurs the line between reality and performance, and encourages audiences to have strong emotional and physical responses. It’s site-specific and participatory, and often interactive, non-linear, and technologically experimental. A discussion of the form can be found on Howlround.]

“I don’t know if I’m going to get that funding,” Bravo said, “and I need to prepare myself to find that funding somewhere else.”

Planning ahead has always been complicated for nonprofit theatres, because the business model makes future viability dependent on a lot of undependable circumstances. This problem has been even more pronounced in the last few years, with increases in production costs and decreases in revenue from ticket sales and subscriptions. This isn’t just a Florida issue, it’s a national one. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, from June 2023 to June 2024, wages and salaries in the private sector rose by 4.6 percent, while benefit costs increased by 3.5 percent. Coupled with an overall inflation rate of 3 percent, which affects the cost of everything from lumber to lights, these rising costs create an extra strain on already lean theatre budgets. This economic pressure forces theatres to make tough decisions, often at the expense of programming and community outreach.

What’s more, every dollar spent on the arts generates approximately nine dollars in local economic activity. Reducing arts funding impacts not only the theatres but also local businesses that benefit from the influx of patrons, such as restaurants and hotels, which in turn affects jobs at supporting small businesses. Miami Beach, for example, benefits from the presence of world-class cultural institutions, which make the city a more attractive place to live and work. By cutting funding for the arts, the state risks undermining its appeal to potential residents and businesses.

“This isn’t just about the intrinsic value of the arts; it’s about economic growth and quality of life,” Hausmann said.

Indeed, according to a study from Americans for the Arts [nonprofit organization whose primary focus is advancing the arts in the U.S.], in collaboration with the state FDAC and Citizens for Florida Arts Inc. [charitable organization that works with the Florida Division of Arts and Culture to advance the arts in the state], the state’s arts and cultural industry generates $5.7 billion in economic activity a year, including $2.9 billion by nonprofit arts and culture organizations, and supports more than 91,000 full-time jobs.

Political Motivations

The veto comes against a backdrop of broader political trends in Florida, including anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. DeSantis publicly justified the veto in a press conference by singling out the four annual fringe festivals that take place in Fort Myers, Tampa, Sarasota, and Orlando, as promoting “sexual” content that was an “inappropriate use of taxpayer dollars.” It’s worth noting that while these fringe festivals do include some adult content, it is always accompanied by warnings and age restrictions. Some observers interpret the funding cut as part of a larger pattern of political extremism. 

“Florida is a guinea pig politically on what could happen nationally,” Bravo said. “We have to pay attention to this and spread the word, because it does feel like we are being silenced in a way.”

[At a press conference on 27 June, however, DeSantis offered this explanation for the veto: “‘We didn't have control over how it was being given,’ DeSantis said of the individual grant awards, during a Thursday appearance in Polk County. ‘So you're having your tax dollars being given in grants to things like the [Orlando] Fringe Festival, which is like a sexual festival where they're doing all this stuff.

[“‘How many of you think your tax dollars should go to fund that? Not very many people would do that,’ he added, explaining for the first time the veto which occurred more than two weeks ago, but which continues to roil Florida's cultural community.”

[The Fringe, the longest-running theater festival in the United States, features shows that sometimes include drag performances or racy adult content.]

In an open letter to DeSantis, leaders from Orlando and Tampa Fringe are asking him to reconsider his veto, further stating they would rather not be included in this year’s budget if that means that funding can be reinstated to other organizations.

To further understand the political climate around the cuts, American Theatre emailed dozens of members of the Florida State House, the Governor’s office, and the Lt. Governor’s office [Jeanette Núñez (b. 1972; Republican Lieutenant Governor of Florida: 2019-Present)] for more information. We received only one reply, from State Representative Vicki Lopez [b. 1958; Republican Member of the Florida House of Representatives: 2022-Present], who said, “While the legislature has indeed shown its support for the arts, a governor’s veto can only be reversed through a veto override. We have made our concerns known to the leadership, but they are the only ones who can call a special session to override vetoes, and they have not signaled a willingness to do so.” Rep. Lopez explained how, as a member of the subcommittees for Pre-K-12 and Infrastructure & Tourism Appropriations, she understands the significant impact that arts and culture have on both education and the economy. “The arts are not just a cultural enrichment but a fundamental pillar for the educational and economic vitality of our communities.”

Social Consequences

Artists are custodians of local heritage, offering both a reflection of and a contribution to a community’s identity. These funding cuts threaten not just the survival of arts organizations, but also the lives of individual artists who already experience financial instability. This instability is exacerbated by the high cost of living in places like Miami, which further strains emerging artists already struggling to make ends meet. 

Andie Arthur, executive director of the South Florida Theatre League [alliance of theatrical organizations and professionals started in 1993, dedicated to nurturing, promoting, and advocating for the growth and prestige of the South Florida theatre industry], highlighted a growing trend of talent drain. “Theatres are accustomed to overcoming adversity, but can we really create sustainable careers in such an unstable environment?” Arthur asks. “We’re seeing a lot of local talent feeling they need to relocate to other states where the environment is more supportive of their careers.”

Beyond the economic impact, City Theatre’s Ledford underscored the emotional and social consequences of these funding cuts.

“The arts are a crucial part of our community’s emotional health,” she said. She mentioned that arts experiences foster empathy and community connection, values that are increasingly vital in today’s polarized environment. The decision to cut funding, she argued, aligns with broader political trends that marginalize and undermine cultural institutions, especially those that challenge prevailing norms.

The Path Forward

Despite the setbacks, there is a palpable sense of resilience among Florida’s cultural leaders. Jones said she was hopeful that this crisis will galvanize community support and advocacy, creating a catalyst for new forms of collaboration and advocacy.

The FCA is not only engaging in grassroots advocacy but also exploring “grass-tops” strategies. These involve leveraging the influence of donors and community leaders who have a stake in the arts and can advocate for renewed support at higher levels of government. The goal is to foster a dialogue that reinforces the value of arts funding and its critical role in enhancing quality of life.

In short, Florida arts leaders are mobilizing to address the funding cuts. “We’re calling on people to speak out, write letters, and advocate for the importance of arts funding,” said Ledford. Ledford encourages both artists and audiences to engage with their legislators and community leaders to emphasize the vital role of the arts in society.

Perhaps DeSantis’s veto will prompt a reevaluation of how arts funding is approached. Jones said she envisions a future where arts funding is recognized not just as a discretionary expenditure but as an essential investment in community health and vibrancy. She advocates for a model where funding is not only stable, but also responsive to the diverse needs of Florida’s cultural landscape.

In the face of adversity, artists have always shown an incredible capacity for renewal and innovation. Through collective action, solidarity, and a renewed commitment to their mission, leaders at Florida’s cultural organizations will continue to fight for their place in the community. As Bravo aptly put it, “We have to continue to tell stories, and our stories are about the people in Miami—they should not be silenced.”

[Cristina Pla-Guzman (she/her) is a nationally recognized, award-winning teaching artist, director, performer, and writer based in Miami.  Pla-Guzman is featured significantly in “Tomorrow’s Tamoras and Titanias: How to Heal the High School Space” by Gabriela Furtado Coutinho, posted on Rick On Theater in “Theater Education & Training, Part 3,” 9 October 2024.

[Even occasional readers of Rick On Theater will know that support for the arts and the inclusion of the arts in education, both as a practical experience and as a subject for academic study, are among my most strongly-held principles.  I have written on the subject many times on this blog and have posted the views of others who share my position. 

[I won’t make a list of the posts on ROT that treat this topic—the list would be too long—instead, I will quote from a letter that George Washington (yes, that George Washington) wrote in 1796 when he made a large endowment to what was then Liberty Hall Academy (and would become my alma mater, Washington and Lee University): “To promote Literature in this rising Empire, and to encourage the Arts, have ever been among the warmest wishes of my heart.”] 

*  *  *  *
“AMERICA’S WAR ON THEATER”
by Daniel Blank 

[“America’s War on Theater” by Daniel Blank was published on the Los Angeles Review of Books website on 22 July 2024.  LARB styles itself as “a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting and disseminating rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts.”  The LABR website officially débuted in April 2012 and a print edition premièred in May 2013.]

Daniel Blank reviews James Shapiro’s “The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War.”

The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture by James Shapiro. Penguin, 2024. 384 pages.

Hostility to theater has been a virulent feature of American life since before the country was founded. In 1774, the First Continental Congress passed the Articles of Association, which aimed to restrict trade with Britain. But the Articles also discouraged “every species of extravagance and dissipation,” which included stage plays among “other expensive diversions and entertainments” like horse racing and cockfighting. The consequences were real: playhouses sat empty, and acting companies toured abroad. This was an early attempt, though hardly the last, to ban theater in the soon-to-be United States—the result of a centuries-old prejudice that has never completely faded from our cultural discourse. Anti-theatrical efforts are not historical blips; they’re an American tradition.

[The Articles of Association, formally known as the Continental Association, was an agreement among the American colonies adopted on 2 October 1774. It called for a trade boycott against British merchants by the colonies specifically to force Parliament to repeal the Intolerable Acts (sometimes called the Insufferable or Coercive Acts), enacted in 1774 as retaliation for the Boston Tea Party (16 December 1773) and strongly opposed by the colonies.

[The trade ban was not only against the importation or consumption of goods from Britain, but also threatened an exportation ban on products from the colonies to Britain if the Intolerable Acts were not repealed. Among the measures for enduring the scarcity of goods was a regimen of frugality and austerity that discouraged most forms of entertainment, including, as Blank implies, theatrical performances.]

James Shapiro’s The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War (2024), a brilliant and absorbing account of the 20th-century effort to establish something like a national theater in the United States, doesn’t go back quite as far as the Revolutionary Era. Between 1935 and 1939, a New Deal work relief program, the Federal Theatre Project [FTP; 1935-39], staged over a thousand productions nationwide, reaching an estimated audience of 30 million people. It was an astonishing undertaking, one whose impetus can be difficult to grasp from a 21st-century perspective. “It was the product,” Shapiro writes, “of a moment when the arts, no less than industry and agriculture, were thought to be vital to the health of the republic and deserving of its support.” That moment turned out to be brief, and the Federal Theatre was short-lived. Its inevitable demise was the result of a sustained effort by a group of lawmakers who were determined to end funding for a program they saw to be “spreading a dangerously progressive as well as a racially integrated vision of America.”

[James Shapiro (b. 1955) is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University who specializes in Shakespeare and the Early Modern period. “James Shapiro’s Shakespeare” by Kirk Woodward, which discusses four of his earlier books (Oberammergau [2000], A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare [2005], Contested Will [2010], and The Year of Lear [2015]) was posted on ROT on 17 November 2020. There are also two articles by Shapiro on other ROT posts: “Shakespeare in Modern English?” (from the New York Times) in “Play On! 36 Playwrights Translate Shakespeare,” 31 January 2016, and “‘The Theater of War,’ by Bryan Doerries,” a review by James Shapiro from the New York Times in “Theater of War, Part 1,” 22 June 2024.    

[The New Deal was a series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945; 32nd President of the United States: 1933-45) between 1933 and 1938 to rescue the U.S. from the Great Depression. One of the programs was the Works Progress Administration (WPA; 1935-43), an agency that employed millions of jobless to carry out public works projects, including the construction of public buildings and roads, among other infrastructure works. One of the projects was the employment of unemployed artists of all fields—painting and sculpture, writing, theater, dance, and music—to make art for public consumption. Out of this, among other projects, came the FTP.]

One of those lawmakers was Martin Dies Jr. [1900-72], a racist [Democratic] congressman from Texas [1931-45] who quickly emerges as the villain in Shapiro’s story. Ambitious and undaunted, Dies “saw which way the political winds were blowing” and set sail in that direction, eventually finding himself at the helm of the Special Committee on Un-American Activities ([HUAC; 1938-75] laying the groundwork for Joe McCarthy’s [1908-57; Republican U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, 1947-57] crusade a decade and a half later). The Federal Theatre proved an easy target, and casting its productions as “un-American” and “Communist” earned Dies national attention. He sought to make a name for himself and to shut down the relief program: by 1939, he had succeeded on both counts. A disappointed President Franklin D. Roosevelt reluctantly signed off on the Federal Theatre’s termination, and it soon faded into obscurity. (Its materials—playbooks, programs, and other theatrical ephemera—were unceremoniously deposited in an airplane hangar in Maryland, where they remained unnoticed until the 1970s.)

In Shapiro’s persuasive account, Dies established a “playbook” (a term that, as Shapiro’s epigraph points out, has a theatrical resonance) that set the stage for some of the same right-wing strategies still in use today. These include making the debate about what is American and what isn’t; identifying and attacking vulnerable groups and organizations; employing intimidating and threatening, even violent, rhetoric; and using the press to disseminate dubious, headline-grabbing claims. Shapiro’s focus is specific—a single federal initiative that existed for only a brief time—and in this sense, the book is reminiscent of some of his Shakespeare scholarship, particularly the award-winning 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005) and its follow-up, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 (2015). This approach allows Shapiro to illuminate, in archivally rich detail, not only the attacks on the Federal Theatre but also its productions and the people behind them. This is an important, much-needed study whose relevance to our current culture wars is uncomfortably apparent from the first page. But it’s also worth noting that efforts to suppress theater were nothing new in the 1930s, even if Dies was remarkably percipient in his tactics. The Federal Theatre’s closure is just one episode in the United States’ long and troubling history of anti-theatricalism.

¤

The Playbook opens on a contentious congressional hearing [before HUAC] in December 1938. Here we meet Hallie Flanagan [1889-1969], the Vassar College professor [“Director of English Speech”] who had been tapped to lead the Federal Theatre a few years earlier, defending the enterprise—and theater itself—with phenomenal poise and determination. Dies and his colleagues grilled her on the question of whether the Federal Theatre was promoting propaganda, apparently unaware that, as Flanagan explained, most theater is in some sense “propagandistic”: it questions the status quo and comments on societal norms and practices. If anything, these productions were “propaganda for democracy,” and as Shapiro points out, “the overwhelming majority” of the Federal Theatre’s productions “were unobjectionable.” But the committee’s concern was those few controversial plays that were more piercing in their social commentary. The fact that Flanagan had spent time as a Guggenheim Fellow [14 months in 1926-27] studying theater in Europe (including the Soviet Union)—a tradition she found to be “intellectually rigorous” and “committed to education and propaganda”—didn’t help her cause.

In theory, the purpose of the hearing was to discuss the Federal Theatre’s activities and, at perhaps a deeper level, the question of whether drama can ever be completely neutral or apolitical. But instead, it became an opportunity for grandstanding, a forum for Dies and his colleagues to attack the country’s “enemies” and “the spiritual lethargy and moral indifference” that allegedly threatened it. Everything about this congressional scene seems painfully familiar: the characters, the setting, the script. Some of the lines Shapiro quotes could easily have been spoken in the current congressional session. (As I began reading The Playbook, for instance, Marjorie Taylor Greene [b. 1974; U.S. Representative from Georgia: 2020-Present] was refusing to call Anthony Fauci “doctor” and stating that he should be imprisoned as he testified before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.) That the Dies committee’s interrogation of Hallie Flanagan seems so immediate speaks partly to Shapiro’s gifts as a storyteller, but also to the state of American government in 2024.

In addition to the moral tenor of Dies’s attack, there was also a financial aspect: whether taxpayers should have to pay for theatrical productions that advocate a social message (although one gets the sense that Dies wouldn’t have been any happier had they been entirely dispassionate). This is a common refrain of anti-theatricalists: that theater is costly and wasteful, and that the money—especially when drawn from the government’s purse—could be better spent elsewhere. Why allocate relief funds to actors to perform a play, the committee wondered, when you could give it to them to perform a tangible service? Why build a theater when you could build a highway? Flanagan reminded the committee that the entire Federal Theatre Project had only “amounted to [. . .] the cost of building one battleship.” It’s a common rebuttal even today, though its effect may be limited: when the New York City arts budget was recently in danger of being slashed—a decision that, thankfully, was narrowly averted—one New York Times editorial observed that these programs could be supported “for the price of a police helicopter” (their police department’s budget authorized the purchase of two).

[Cuts across the board in the New York City budget for Fiscal Year 2025, including additional cuts to arts and cultural programs on top of FY 2024 reductions, were announced in January 2024. After pleas from arts organizations and cultural leaders in the city, much of the threatened reductions was restored in June.]

Again, though, in these sorts of discussions, logical reasoning usually takes a backseat to uninformed showboating. The Dies committee aimed to paint a very specific kind of picture for their fellow legislators and the American people, rooted less in fact than in ideology. This presents another axiom of anti-theatrical movements: opponents tend to know very little about the theater they’re attacking. None of the committee members, Shapiro observes, “had ever seen a Federal Theatre production.” Nor did they have much knowledge of theater more broadly: one of the committee members, Joe Starnes of Alabama [1895-1962; Democratic U.S. Representative: 1935-45], became an object of ridicule when he unwittingly asked if [William] Shakespeare’s [1564-1616] contemporary Christopher Marlowe [1564?-93] was a communist. The Dies committee wanted to gut a program they knew almost nothing about. It seems telling that the committee’s 124-page report did not mention a single play.

¤

The sheer popularity of theater in 19th and early-20th-century America can be difficult to fathom. In The Playbook’s second chapter, we encounter a young Willa Cather [novelist; 1873-1947], who at the turn of the century was a theater critic in Lincoln, Nebraska [for the Nebraska State Journal and the Lincoln Courier in 1894, while she was a student at the University of Nebraska]. Despite being a rural state with a population just above a million [New York City’s population was over half again as much at this time], Nebraska boasted over 50 playhouses in 1890: during a particular week in Lincoln in the spring of 1894, Cather was able to see and review five separate theatrical productions. The metrics alone are staggering. Shapiro estimates that as many as a quarter of the adult-aged population in Lincoln saw a play that week—“a theatergoing intensity,” he claims, “not seen since London in Shakespeare’s day.” “[P]laygoing,” Shapiro concludes, “was a national pastime.”

That popularity would wane in the decades that followed, due in large part to the arrival of motion pictures. Lamenting what had been lost, Cather remarked in the late 1920s that only live theater “can make us forget who we are and where we are,” while films “do not make us feel anything more than interest or curiosity or astonishment.” In a sense, the Federal Theatre’s success recaptured what had been so magical about American theater just a generation earlier: the Omaha World-Herald proclaimed that it “filled [. . .] the gap that was made when the movies took over.” But popularity is a double-edged sword: from ancient Greece to the Shakespearean stage, successful theatrical traditions have almost always met with hostility. To be sure, the Dies committee was more successful than many previous anti-theatrical efforts throughout history. But it also attests to just how vibrant the Federal Theatre—and the spirit of American theater it reclaimed—was.

The Playbook’s central chapters each focus on a single Federal Theatre show, including a production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth that premiered in April 1936. It was staged in Harlem by one of the “Negro Units,” which had been established across the country “to support Black actors and playwrights.” Set in 19th-century Haiti, with a cast of 137, this incredibly innovative production—which became known as the “Voodoo Macbeth”—was also the Federal Theatre’s biggest hit. This was especially clear on opening night when a marching band made its way through Harlem behind a banner that read “Macbeth by William Shakespeare,” and a crowd of more than 10,000 people gathered outside Harlem’s Lafayette Theatre; a preview performance a few nights earlier had drawn 3,000. The Lafayette’s capacity was about 1,200. [The show ran 9 April-20 June 1936 at the Lafayette before moving to the Adelphi on Broadway.]

None of that success prevented certain journalists from writing about the production in negative, racist terms. (Here and elsewhere, Shapiro does not shy away from these accounts, opting instead to give a full picture of the atmosphere surrounding the Federal Theatre and the obstacles it faced.) Nor did it stop the director, a 20-year-old Orson Welles [1915-85], from taking full credit: his working script was titled “Macbeth by William Shakespeare, Negro Version, Conceived, Arranged, Staged by Orson Welles”; in later years, he would recall the production without even mentioning its lead actors, Jack Carter [c. 1902-67] and Edna Thomas [1885-1974], or the many other cast and creative team members responsible for its success. But the Harlem Macbeth was nonetheless a great triumph for the Federal Theatre, and its popularity undeniable. After transferring to Broadway [Adelphi Theatre, 7-18 July 1936], it traveled the country for three months with a company of 180 people—“the largest Shakespeare production,” notes Shapiro, “to ever tour America.”

It is easy to see why Dies and his like-minded cohort found the Federal Theatre’s productions so threatening. It wasn’t just that they promoted a more liberal, inclusive vision of the United States than Dies was comfortable with. It was also that they were drawing huge crowds across the country—and their message was spreading.

¤

One of the most striking aspects of The Playbook—at least to a reader who, like me, is deeply interested in amateur theater—is how many people involved in the Federal Theatre Project were not theater professionals. To some degree, this was by design: the Federal Theatre’s intention, after all, was to put people back to work, often regardless of the credits on their résumés. But it is nevertheless surprising that its leadership also drew from amateur backgrounds. The majority of Hallie Flanagan’s theatrical experience came from her time at Vassar, where she was involved in campus productions and designed a program around “Experimental Theatre.” This notion of experimentation undoubtedly shaped her vision of what the stage should be, and it helps us to conceptualize the Federal Theatre as a whole: for the majority of productions, a polished Broadway show was neither the goal nor the outcome. They even sometimes came across as a bit ragtag: in one instance, Flanagan stepped in at the last minute to help build a set and locate props, as if she were helping to salvage a student play.

Much more than professionalism, the goal of the Federal Theatre was to be relatable to its audience members and to make them reflect on important social and political issues. Relevance was key—especially for those who may never have been in a theater before, or not for many years—and to make productions relevant, they had to be adaptable. In the summer of 1936, the Federal Theatre signed a deal with Sinclair Lewis [1885-1951] to produce a theatrical version of his chilling novel It Can’t Happen Here (1935), which warned about the destruction of democracy and the rise of fascism. [Fascists or right-wing totalitarians Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) was Duce (‘Leader’) of Italy in 1922-43, António Salazar (1889-1970) was Chefe (‘Boss’) of Portugal in 1932-68, Engelbert Dolfuss (1892-1934) was Chancellor of Austria in 1932-34, Adolf Hitler (1899-1945) was Führer (‘Leader’) of Germany in 1933-45, and Francisco Franco (1892-1975) was Caudillo (‘Leader’) of Spain in 1936-75.] The book had originally been slated to be turned into a film by MGM, but the script—which did not hold back in its depictions of “concentration camps, the burning of the books, the invasion of homes”—was ultimately deemed too “politically inflammatory.” The goal was to have the play open simultaneously in different cities across the country, demonstrating that, “like a film, a play could open on the same day everywhere.” This plan proved to be overly ambitious, and productions were canceled, for various reasons, in New Orleans, Kansas City, and Brooklyn. For those that went forward, however, the individual directors had been encouraged to “bring the play to a close in a way that worked best locally.” The ending in Cincinnati, Tacoma, and Seattle was different from the ending in Omaha, which was different from the ending in San Francisco. Part of having a “national” theater was recognizing that the play would speak differently to different parts of the nation.

[The stage version of It Can't Happen Here was written by Sinclair Lewis and John C. Moffitt. It premiered on 27 October 1936, in 21 U.S. theaters in 17 states simultaneously, in productions sponsored by the Federal Theater Project.]

The situation was similar with a play called One Third of a Nation [1938]. Its subject was the dangerous, substandard living conditions in New York City: the play both began and ended with a tenement fire. But housing issues were not the same everywhere, and once again, regional productions were encouraged to adapt the play for local audiences. During a two-month run in Philadelphia, Shapiro explains, “the focus was changed from White to Black slum dwellers, and the survivor of the tragic tenement disaster in the opening scenes is a Black woman rather than a Jewish man.” The primary public concern in Philadelphia was construction quality rather than fire, so the “disaster” at the beginning of the play was changed to a building collapse. As was often the case, the Federal Theatre’s art channeled reality, making it more immediate for those on and off the stage. Shapiro quotes from Arthur Jarvis Jr., who notes that “some cast members lived in the very conditions condemned by the drama and could bring their personal experiences to each performance.”

[The quotations from Arthur Jarvis, Jr., to which Blank refers above seem to correspond to Arthur R. Jarvis, Jr., the author of "Cultural Nationalism in an Urban Setting: the Philadelphia Experience with Federal Project Number One of the Works Progress Administration, 1935-1943," a 1995 dissertation for a Ph.D. in history at Pennsylvania State University. 

[The dissertation’s “Abstract” states that “written guidelines [for FTP programs] forced participants to probe the city's [i.e., Philadelphia] heritage for useful material. This resulted in local scenes being recreated by the artists [and] at least one theatrical presentation directly influenced by the city's outdated housing code . . . .” 

[Jarvis continues, “Although art, theatre, writing, and music projects all operated in Philadelphia, they had varying degrees of success due to the city's cultural climate.” He concludes the summary, “This thesis explores how the projects influenced the city and how project success was affected by Philadelphia institutions.” (It seems that Jarivs’s actual words cited by Shapiro were taken from an article Jarvis published in a scholarly journal: “The Living Newspaper in Philadelphia, 1938-1939,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies [Pennsylvania State U., University Park] 61.3 [July 1994]).] 

Not all of the Federal Theatre’s productions were successful. A play called Liberty Deferred [1938], which confronted the horrors of racism throughout American history, met with intense resistance and was never staged—an emblem of the Federal Theatre’s failure to live up to its ideals. And when the Federal Theatre sold the film rights to One Third of a Nation [1939], it was turned into a sanitized, whitewashed version that heavily diluted the play’s biting message about the need for government intervention in the housing emergency. The project’s ultimate failure, of course, came at the hands of the Dies committee. But in its attempt to establish a national theater—one that had a broad reach, spanning racial and class divides and speaking to both local and nationwide concerns—the Federal Theatre came closer than anything has before or since.

[One Third of a Nation and Liberty Deferred were both Living Newspaper productions, created by the FTP’s Living Newspaper Units, transforming current events from the page to the stage by creating plays with scenes that dramatized newspaper articles.

[Living Newspapers were nonfiction—realistic, current, relevant—and the topics were always recent. The Living Newspapers frequently dramatized social issues of the day and often implicitly or explicitly urged social action, so controversy over their politics contributed to the disbanding of the FTP in 1939.]

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We don’t need to look too hard to see the Dies committee’s legacy. In a brief epilogue, Shapiro points to present-day efforts to suppress the arts, from House Republicans’ attempts to defund the National Endowment for the Arts [see “A History of the National Endowment for the Arts” (5, 8, 11, 14, 17, 20, and 30 November; 3, 13, 16, and 19 December 2023)] to attacks on student theatrical productions in high schools across the country. As I was writing this review, it was reported that Florida governor and erstwhile presidential candidate Ron DeSantis decided without explanation to veto all grants for arts organizations [see above]; it is no coincidence that he has championed book bans and education mandates that have led to the removal of Shakespeare from school libraries and classrooms.

What, then, is the path forward? It is at least encouraging that, if anti-theatricalism is an American tradition, so too is resistance to it. It was none other than George Washington who, despite the ban on theater, sanctioned a series of performances by army officers at Valley Forge in the spring of 1778, intended to boost morale and rally the cause; Joseph Addison’s [English essayist, poet, playwright, and politician; 1672-1719] Cato [1712; premièred, 1713], apparently one of Washington’s favorite plays, depicted liberty’s victory over tyranny. Washington was fighting against Britain, but he also took a stand against one of the Articles of Association’s oppressive restrictions. The colonists followed his lead: when Congress doubled down on its anti-theatrical stance a few months later, several states refused to support their position. 

[Cato is a dramatization of the last days of the Roman Senator Marcus Porcius Cato (“Cato the Younger”; 95-46 BCE), who, for Addison, served as an exemplar of republican virtue and opposition to tyranny. The patrician Cato, a follower of Stoicism, joined the senatorial opposition to Caesar.

[George Washington (1732-99; Commander in Chief of the Continental Army: 1775-83; First President of the United States: 1789-97) shared Addison's enthusiasm for Cato's self-sacrificing republican virtue, and frequently quoted from Addison's play. Washington identified with Cato, the self-disciplined patriot prepared to give his life for the cause of liberty. At the end of the hard winter of 1777 at Valley Forge, Washington defied a congressional ban on theatrical productions (enacted in 1774 to discourage “extravagance and dissipation”) and entertained his men with a production of Cato.]

The Playbook is a timely reminder both of the power of theater and of the vehement antipathy it can generate. In establishing one of his main themes, Shapiro stresses in the book’s preface that “the health of democracy and theater, twin-born in ancient Greece, has always been mutually dependent.” But the third sibling in this story is anti-theatricalism, which usually arises when theatrical traditions flourish in healthy democracies. It would be easy to view the Federal Theatre’s demise as more or less unique, an isolated incident from which today’s conservative lawmakers continue to draw inspiration. But it would be more accurate to view the story of American anti-theatricalism as a continuous tradition that never really went away and perhaps never will.

[Daniel Blank was an assistant professor of English at Durham University in the United Kingdom and is now the Managing Director of Public Programs at the Free Library of Philadelphia Foundation in Pennsylvania.  His articles on Shakespeare and early modern drama have been published in journals including Renaissance Quarterly, The Review of English Studies, and Renaissance Studies.  His first book, Shakespeare and University Drama in Early Modern England, was published by Oxford University Press in 2023.  Before coming to Durham, he received his PhD from Princeton University and spent three years in the Harvard Society of Fellows.]