No. 2 Official Ousted From Post at NEA : Arts: On another front, L.A.’s Center Theatre Group joins other cultural organizations in protesting obscenity restrictions.

New developments concerning the National Endowment for the Arts--including a personnel crisis that led to the ouster of its No. 2 official, and new actions by influential cultural institutions protesting obscenity restrictions--combined over the weekend to intensify pressures on the beleaguered agency.

Among the developments:

* NEA sources confirmed Sunday morning that Alvin S. Felzenberg, the endowment’s second highest administrator who assumed his job only this past Feb. 1, is being forced out in an apparent personality clash with NEA Chairman John E. Frohnmayer.

* The Felzenberg departure is only a symptom of deeper personnel problems that have begun, NEA sources said Sunday, to impair the agency’s ability to transact routine business as it faces a showdown with Congress over its survival. Three top NEA jobs have been vacant since late last year and sources said that leadership problems are developing within the agency with growing resentment over placement in the NEA of at least two officials active in President Bush’s 1988 campaign.

* In Los Angeles, the Center Theatre Group announced that its board voted unanimously Wednesday to accept new NEA support under protest of the endowment’s anti-obscenity policy, and at the same time notify the endowment that the parent group of the Mark Taper Forum, Ahmanson Theatre and Doolittle Theatre will challenge in court any NEA determination that a play it produces is obscene.

* The University of Iowa Press, one of the nation’s most prominent university-based literary publishers, disclosed Friday evening that it will reject a $12,000 grant from the NEA. The NEA grant would have helped support publication of a volume of work by winners of the prestigious Iowa Short Fiction Prize for 1990, a 20-year-old literary competition that recognizes some of the country’s most prominent new writers.

Felzenberg’s impending departure was confirmed by NEA sources early Sunday. The White House has reportedly agreed to place Felzenberg in another policy development position within the Bush Administration--with Felzenberg staying at the NEA until the switch can be affected.

“I am still working at the agency,” Felzenberg said Sunday, “and I’m going to work at the NEA tomorrow morning.”

Sources familiar with the situation said Felzenberg had been forced out in a clash of management styles and objectives for the NEA with Frohnmayer, from whom Felzenberg has reportedly been ideologically estranged almost since he started work at the endowment.

Felzenberg’s was intended to be the chief administrative position in the NEA. It theoretically left Frohnmayer free to devote his time to policy development and arts-political issues, but there have been persistent reports that the two never got along and seldom spoke to each other.

The split has played a key role in the failure of the arts agency to fill three top positions, according to NEA sources, who added that the situation has resulted in the agency sometimes having difficulty--publicly and, increasingly, internally--articulating its position on creative and cultural matters as the crisis in Congress over the endowment’s continued existence has escalated.

Vacant are the positions of senior deputy chairman for programs--a position that has overall charge of the NEA’s 14 major creative divisions, including dance, music, visual arts and theater--as well as the positions of program director for two of the divisions themselves. The endowment’s literature and opera-musical theater divisions have both been in the charge of acting directors since Frohnmayer took over the NEA late last year.

NEA sources said Felzenberg had suggested candidates for all three jobs after an extensive period of interviewing--part of which occurred during a trip Frohnmayer, Felzenberg and other NEA officials made to the West Coast in March. The leading candidate for the opera-musical theater job reportedly turned down the position several weeks ago.

In addition, these NEA sources said, existing endowment program directors have felt increasingly estranged from Frohnmayer and the upper layers of the NEA leadership--with the difficulties increasing in the last two weeks as Frohnmayer has pressured the program heads to suggest ways the NEA could be restructured. The move has been widely interpreted within the NEA as suggesting that the endowment is trying to prepare a fallback position in its battles with Congress.

The program directors, these sources said, are also concerned about the placement in the NEA of Kitty Baier, who is planning a 25th anniversary celebration for the NEA later this year, and Ann Colgrove, the agency’s director of policy, planning and research.

Baier came to the agency from another political appointment in the Commerce Department and has been identified as closely connected to top officials of the Republican National Committee. Colgrove, who was transferred to the NEA from the Labor Department, was an active volunteer in Bush’s 1988 campaign, according to the Republican National Committee.

Felzenberg was also routed to the NEA by the White House--reportedly with instructions that he be hired for the position instead of a candidate Frohnmayer favored. The NEA’s chief of public affairs, Jack Lichtenstein, also ended up at the NEA via the White House.

Frohnmayer could not be reached for comment Sunday. However, he was asked about the relationship between the White House and NEA personnel decisions in an interview several weeks ago. “That’s untrue,” he said of reports of resumes channeled wholesale to the arts agency from the White House. “What is true is that they have made some suggestions to us, some of which we’ve taken and some of which we haven’t. They have been very helpful in making suggestions, which I think is entirely appropriate.”

At the Center Theatre Group, officials said their decision to put the NEA on notice they may sue as part of a protest over congressionally mandated pornography restrictions on the arts endowment, was a position they felt compelled to take because of recent political events.

“We have no plans at this time to initiate preemptive litigation,” said Martin C. Washton, a Los Angeles lawyer who is secretary to the Center Theatre Group board. “But it is our view that works presented on CTG stages must be uncensored and unfettered. If and when . . . NEA suggests that funds will be withheld because of the content of our artistic productions, it may be necessary to seek judicial intervention.”

The actions by the Center Theatre Group and the University of Iowa Press underscored the growing depth of concern in the artistic community over the implications for national cultural policy of the 14-month-long political controversy over the NEA. The endowment’s 1990 appropriation bill was amended by conservatives in Congress to outlaw funding of artworks that the NEA determines to be obscene.

At least two grantees have turned down NEA money to protest the requirement, which critics have attacked as unconstitutionally vague and open to political interference. The New School for Social Research in New York has sued the endowment to nullify a requirement that NEA grantees sign an acknowledgment that they will not produce obscene work. Critics have attacked the certification as the equivalent of an anti-obscenity loyalty oath.

In taking its stand, the Center Theatre Group chose a significantly different strategy from New York theater producer Joseph Papp, who has already rejected $50,000 in NEA funding and announced that he will turn down as much as $400,000 more if the obscenity oath is not rescinded. Center Theatre Group, said its artistic director, Gordon Davidson, expects to be offered about $300,000 in NEA support this year--a major portion of its budget.

“My first instinct is to refuse to sign and to turn back the grant as some of my colleagues have already done,” Davidson said. “But I am as concerned about the health and future of the NEA as I am about restrictive clauses. Therefore, I embrace this endorsement from the board.”

Paul Zimmer, the University of Iowa Press’s director, said the $12,000 NEA grant--rejection of which he said had been approved by the university administration--would have been the fifth award by the arts endowment to support publication of work by the fiction prizewinners. “I very desperately need this money, but I don’t need it as it is restricted,” Zimmer said in a telephone interview. “I was stunned to receive (the grant letter including the obscenity certification requirement).

“As far as I’m concerned, it taints the money, and I don’t want any part of it. I don’t think this is the National Endowment’s fault . . . It’s the fault of the process of Congress.”

“This is one of the most distinguished university presses in the country,” said Liam Rector, director of the Associated Writing Programs at Old Dominion University in Virginia, “and coming from the heartland, as it does, and surrounded by the literary community in the Midwest, I think it has to speak significantly to where a broad spectrum of Americans stand on civil liberties and the infringement of them.”

Zimmer’s decision brought a sober reaction from Frank Conroy, a former head of the NEA’s literature program who now runs the Iowa Writers Workshop, another prominent Midwest program that has helped to create a climate that encourages serious fiction and nonfiction writing as prominent as anything in New York or California.

“This comes at an incredibly delicate moment for the NEA,” said Conroy. He noted that the arts endowment faces a series of key votes in Congress in the next month that may determine whether it survives at all or if it will be hamstrung by a series of amendments that could further limit the content of work it supports or turn over most of the NEA’s money to state arts councils.