Arts Endowment Grant for Old Globe Shrinks

The National Endowment for the Arts, with an increasing demand for a diminishing supply of dollars, is beginning to look like the Incredible Shrinking Grant to institutions like the Old Globe Theatre.

The Old Globe, which received the largest professional theater grant the NEA gave to any San Diego theater in 1989, was dismayed--but not surprised--to find a reduction in its annual grant from last year’s $187,500 to $180,000.

In 1989, the NEA received 404 theater grant applications, 25 more than in ‘88, but had slightly less money available than in the previous year.

“There had to be some cutting,” said Ben Cameron, of the NEA’s theater program. “We’re seeing more competition than ever before. The panel didn’t cut to be artistically punitive. They had to find the money somewhere in order to recognize artistic excellence in as many places as they could. That affected theaters with the largest grant amounts, which is anything over $100,000.”

But Thomas Hall, managing director of the Old Globe, feels his company’s reduction does not bode well for the future of larger theaters.

“It was an across-the-board reduction from the larger institutions and the ones who have been in the funding pool for a long time to allow for new institutions to enter the file to be funded,” said Hall, who pointed out that there is an initiative to make a 10% across-the-board reduction for next year.

“I don’t begrudge the (newer) institutions,” Hall said. “I think there needs to be money for them. But it’s extremely frustrating to continue to receive accolades and be told there isn’t enough money. Government has to show people that art is vitally important not only to us but to the next generation. By freezing and reducing when the cost of living goes up sends a message that we don’t value art and the intrinsic value of the lessons it teaches about the responsibility we have to each other and the need for compassion and conscience.”

The La Jolla Playhouse received $85,000, the same amount it has received for the past three years. (The grant is separate from the fund-raising campaign the playhouse has embarked on to raise $500,000 before Dec. 31 to ensure that there will be a 1990 season.) Only the San Diego Repertory Theatre, which received $35,000, marked an increase over the $20,000 it received last year.

Under the circumstance, the La Jolla Playhouse is satisfied with its funding level, according to managing director Alan Levey: “Staying the same was really doing well in the context of what the NEA has been able to do.”

And the San Diego Rep is very pleased. “The NEA evaluates primarily on artistic merit, and we take it as a real message,” said Adrian Stewart, managing director of the San Diego Rep.

One of the happy individual recipients of the NEA largess was Oana-Maria Hock, the only San Diego playwright to receive a Playwright Fellowship Grant from the NEA. Hock was awarded $15,000, $2,500 of which is to be earmarked for residency programs.

Hock, who recently relocated to New Hampshire where her husband, Roger R. Hock, has a one-year teaching position at New England College, plans to return to San Diego next summer to do a rehearsed reading of a new play, yet to be named, at the La Jolla Playhouse.

The NEA endorsement of Hock’s work comes, ironically, on the heels of the California Arts Council’s criticism of her play, “The Man Who Had No Story,” presented as part of the La Jolla Playhouse’s Performance Outreach Project as part of the reason for slashing the La Jolla Playhouse’s California Arts Council grant this year.

Born in Bucharest, Romania, Hock worked as a film and theater critic before she moved to the United States in 1980 and decided to focus on playwrighting. She received a master of fine arts degree in playwrighting from UC San Diego, and had five of her plays produced in the last four years. Her “East European Tetralogy” was nominated by the San Diego Theatre Critics Circle as the best new play of 1986. “Berlin, Berlin,” which was produced by UCSD in 1987, was recently presented at Brandeis University along with her play “Exchange at Cafe Mimosa,” one of the plays read at the American Repertory Theatre last year.

Hock’s next workshop production will be at the Trinity Repertory Theatre in January under the guidance of the company’s artistic director, former UCSD theater professor Anne Bogart, and now is two weeks away from completing a play that the UCSD drama department commissioned her to write about fellow Romanian Mandell Weiss, the chief benefactor of the Mandell Weiss Theatre and to-be-built Mandell Weiss Forum, shared by UCSD and the Playhouse.

“It opens a lot of doors, and the money helped me because it allows me the time to research and work rather than look for a job,” said Hock of the grant on the phone from New Hampshire. “At the moment I can just use it for writing and researching. I feel great.”

The first action of the coalition of arts and cultural organizations in San Diego (which has yet to decide on a formal name for itself) was a poll of the candidates for the 1st and 5th City Council districts. Although the group declined to endorse any candidates--that’s not its objective--the answers of the two winners, Abbe Wolfsheimer of the 1st District and Linda Bernhardt of the 5th, showed a definite endorsement of the arts even if the two did differ decidedly from each other on the issue of public funding for the Soviet arts festival. Wolfsheimer opposed it, Bernhardt was for it.

Wolfsheimer listed among her arts credentials: a vote against public funding to the Soviet arts festival (she said the money would be better spent on local arts organizations and artists and their funding should not be frozen for three years or more.); support for Installation Gallery when its transient occupancy tax allocation was threatened and an active role in many arts organizations over the past 27 years, including being a founding member and patron of the La Jolla Playhouse and a patron of both the Old Globe Theatre and the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre (where she is an honorary member of the Board of Trustees).

Bernhardt said she supports the continuation of a tri-annual arts and cultural festival (like the Soviet arts festival), to be supported by private and public funding; depoliticizing the process of distributing transit occupancy tax money to art organizations; and the city’s Art in Public Places program.