SCR Contest Among Losses to Arts Veto

South Coast Repertory’s California Playwrights Festival--the centerpiece of the Costa Mesa theater company’s 25th anniversary celebration--was an early victim of Gov. George Deukmejian’s surprise veto last week of a $1-million matching fund for the arts.

The Friday veto of the California Arts Council’s new California Challenge Program also hit 41 other arts groups that expected funding for projects as diverse as a chamber music series in historic sites and an electric freeway billboard to proclaim cultural attractions in Long Beach.

“Never in a thousand years did we suspect the program was in jeopardy,” said CAC director Robert Reid, a Deukmejian appointee.

With much fanfare, the council announced June 3 the award of $930,000 to 42 organizations statewide, including grants to such Southern California institutions as Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum, the Long Beach Opera and the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art. The balance of the $1 million would have paid for a Sacramento-based administrator.

As the program required recipients to double or triple the grant amount with money from new, private donors, it was considered an example of the Deukmejian Administration’s approach to arts funding and was part of the governor’s initial budget proposal in January. “You make the assumption that if this is part of the governor’s proposed budget, it’s safe,” Reid said.

Arts organizers said they made the same assumption when notified of the council’s awards, and budgeted accordingly. Some reacted with agitation when informed that their grants were among the $472 million Deukmejian cut from the $44-billion state budget he signed Friday.

“Why commit these funds and take us through this up and down? I’d prefer it if they had never given it to us than to give it to us and take it away,” said Judith Baca, artistic director of the Social and Public Arts Resource Center in Venice. Her $15,000 grant was to have underwritten the “World Wall,” a traveling exhibit of seven 10-by-30-foot painted panels depicting the transformation of the world into a peaceful place.

“I’m just terribly devastated. And I’m angry, too,” Baca said, adding that she hoped to use part of the money to pay her own salary. The “World Wall” will continue, however, due to a $15,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, Baca said.

But Martin Benson, artistic director of South Coast Repertory, said the Tony Award-winning theater company’s California Playwrights Festival has been imperiled by the loss of its $42,500 grant.

The festival would have solicited new plays from California writers, awarded cash prizes to the winners and produced some works on SCR stages.

After signing the grant contract with the arts council, SCR assumed it would receive the money, Benson said. “We’ve ballyhooed the California Playwrights Festival as the centerpiece of our 25th anniversary season, and suddenly the rug is pulled right out from under us.”

He said his company would try to salvage the competition by making cutbacks in other areas, but said “there’s a very definite chance we won’t be able to pull it off.”

Benson, like many others affected by the veto, complained that the arts were already underfunded by the state. California ranks 32nd nationwide in arts funding, according to the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies.

“The fact that a program as important as this is, with so little cost, has to be lopped off has to be seen as very brutal and shortsighted,” Benson said.

MaryAnn Bonino, director of Da Camera Society, which would have used its $25,000 grant for the statewide chamber music series, said the cut in state matching funds will discourage corporate donors from giving money to the arts.

“What this (veto) says to me is that California doesn’t want to have much of an artistic vision. I think the state deserves better,” she said.

Democratic legislators agreed. “To (Deukmejian) it’s penny-wise, but to anybody familiar with the arts, it’s pound foolish,” said Assemblyman Sam Farr (D-Monterey), vice chairman of the Legislature’s Joint Committee on the Arts.

The California Challenge veto “was totally vindictive,” Farr said, asserting that Deukmejian was taking revenge on the Legislature’s Democrats through the “blood and wreckage” of high-profile programs.

Farr said the cut could have been avoided if Deukmejian had not withdrawn a proposal to increase revenue by speeding up the collection of some state taxes.

But the Republican governor’s deputy finance director, Russ Gould, said that the state’s unexpected revenue shortfall of $1.1 billion forced his hand. “It was not malice toward the program,” he said, but Deukmejian had determined not to fund new state initiatives this year.

The governor “had to take a fresh look at things and re-prioritize,” Gould said.

While insisting that the veto has harmed their programs, many arts groups said they will probably be able to pull off their projects without the California Challenge money.

Gordon Davidson, artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum, said his project, a multi-disciplinary work about Japanese-Americans titled “Sansei,” would probably survive without its $50,000 grant.

But San Diego Freeway commuters will have to do without a conceptual billboard announcing cultural events under way in Long Beach.

The executive director of that city’s Public Corp. for the Arts, Lindsay Shields, said she intended to use her $25,000 grant for “a wonderful, spectacular idea.”

“It was going to be like the Hollywood Bowl computerized sign, but we were going to have a nationwide contest to design an artsy computerized sign,” she said.

“Oh, that doesn’t sound too good,” she quickly added. “Let’s call it an artistic computerized sign.”