Artless Council Rattles Its Funds at SCR’s Stance : A complaint about a flyer sent out by South Coast Repertory supporting NEA resulted in Costa Mesa’s holding up all this year’s funding to arts groups.

Get out your score cards, folks, because this is a tricky one.

The players: South Coast Repertory, the Tony Award-winning theater company in Costa Mesa; the Costa Mesa City Council; one teed-off resident; the beleaguered National Endowment for the Arts.

The situation: The Costa Mesa City Council voted last week to hold up all this year’s grants to local arts groups--$175,000 worth--because a resident complained about a flyer SCR sent out recently. In the leaflet, SCR officials stated their support for the NEA, which has supplied federal money to the company for years, and asked playgoers who agree with them to voice their feelings to their congressmen and senators.

The complaint: Maybe some city money was used to print the leaflet. If true, the city would have been underwriting SCR’s stance on a political issue--at least in the eyes of Mayor Peter F. Buffa and other council members who agreed with him to hold up all arts grant money, not just SCR’s allotted $30,000, while conducting an investigation.

The way I read this, these government officials won’t give government money to any arts group that spends government money to publicly defend government money for the arts.

Did you ever get the feeling the elevator at City Hall doesn’t go to the top floor?

The bottom line: SCR officials have quickly and courteously sworn up and down to the mayor and the council that they did not use any city funds to produce flyers, that city money has been used only for community service programs, such as the productions SCR takes to local schools.

The one positive aspect of the whole episode is that it proves one individual indeed can make a difference in the workings of government, i.e., the Costa Mesa resident who brought the issue up at an earlier council meeting.

But it doesn’t say much for the council’s opinion of the value of the arts in general and specifically of the one arts group in the city that has won national recognition.

Maybe it’s time for the council members to take another look at their own motto. Costa Mesa is, you might recall, supposed to be “the city of the arts.” It says so on just about everything the Chamber of Commerce prints up.

But council members must not have been hanging around the C of C office much lately, for all it took was one upset voter to shout “Fire!,” and without so much as looking around for any hint of smoke, the Grand Poo-Bahs of Goat Hill hosed down the city’s entire arts community.

Coincidentally, at the same meeting the council voted to give $400,000 to the promoters of “Festival of Britain Orange County--1990.” This event, to take place in the fall, will include several arts performances around the county. But “BritFest” is primarily a retail sales promotion for British-themed merchandise at the South Coast Plaza shopping center.

It wouldn’t take a complete cynic to view that vote as a political statement, that the only activities worthy of significant financial support are those that result in a chorus of chimes at local cash registers.

If the council members could see beyond their noses, or past their reelection campaign coffers, they might realize that, in a way, everything South Coast Repertory does can be viewed as a political statement.

The most obvious statement SCR makes is through its refusal to do conventional, polite Neil Simon or needless revivals of decades-old musicals.

Then there are the messages in the works they do stage. Remember their staging of Richard Sheridan’s “The School for Scandal,” which lampooned society types who have nothing better to do than sit around and stick their noses in other people’s affairs?

Or their 1988 production of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” which railed against the lynch-mob mentality of knee-jerk reactionaries who act on hearsay and ignorance rather than on truth and common sense?

Even their version of David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross,” a play that shish-kebabs the salesman’s nonstop hucksterism, might have hit home--if they’d paid attention.

Perhaps it was in the best interest of SCR officials to submit meekly and calmly point out that there was no transgression after all. That way, they’ll probably still get their money when the city takes up the issue again next week. And then SCR can go about its business of trying to give Orange County theater lovers something worth viewing, and thinking about, season in and season out.

If it were me, though, I’d buy five tickets (out of my own pocket, of course) to the Grove Shakespeare Festival’s latest offering and send the council members over for a complimentary object lesson in “Much Ado About Nothing.”

Randy Lewis’ column moves from Sundays and will now appear each Friday.