$500,000 FUND CREATED FOR NEW PLAYS

A fund to assist in the production of new American plays at theaters around the country has been established by the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.

“The key to a thriving American theater is an environment that fosters the development of new plays and playwrights, but for many years the financial obstacles to creating such an environment have been very discouraging,” said Kennedy Center chairman Roger L. Stevens. He made the announcement at a press conference held at the new corporate headquarters of American Express, underwriters with the Kennedy Center of the new $500,000 fund.

The fund is intended to provide grants of up to $100,000 to regional theaters for new plays to be produced during the 1987-88 season.

The grants are to be earmarked for special expenses required for the mounting of new plays that the nonprofit theaters might not normally be able to afford, according to the guidelines for the new fund, such expenses include allowing playwrights to remain on hand for rehearsals and rewriting; the playwright’s choice of director, designer and guest actors; and for large cast productions. Stevens expressed the hope that seven or eight new plays might be funded in the initial year “to test the waters.”

The idea for the new fund was proposed by Stevens about a year ago, according to Andrew Heiskell, chairman of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, who said Wednesday that the Kennedy Center chairman “hit us over the head often enough that we came to recognize the critical financial need (for new plays).”

It was the President’s Committee, created in 1982 to seek support for the Arts and Humanities from the private sector, that enlisted American Express. The company has recently given support to regional theaters, including the underwriting of an annual Tony Award for theater excellence at the regional level.

“This (fund) comes at a crucial time,” Gordon Davidson, artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, said at Wednesday’s press conference. He is a member of a committee of theater professionals chosen to select the theaters and plays to be awarded grants from the new fund.

Other members are Robert Fryer (Center Theatre Group-Ahmanson), Jack O’Brien (San Diego Old Globe), Andre Bishop (New York’s Playwrights’ Horizons), designer Ben Edwards, independent producers Robert Whitehead and Roger Berlind and historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

Citing the diminishing support for work at the regional theater level from traditional sources such as the Ford Foundation, Davidson said that more original drama is coming from elsewhere, including Great Britain, “because others have more support than we (in America) have had. The challenge here is to try to stimulate the collaboration of theaters and playwrights in the undertaking of ambitious new plays.”