THE VOICES OF AMERICAN THEATER : Artistic leaders gather in the face of shrinking funds, declining audiences and the national furor over the NEA

Every two years, in this somnolent New England town in the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains, the nation’s regional theater leaders gather to test the nation’s cultural winds. This summer, with the National Endowment for the Arts controversy blowing at near gale force, they are clearly winds of change.

“There has been a shift in the artistic equation,” said Gordon Davidson, artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum, during the conference, held in late June. “The Realpolitik of theater today is that it involves boards, the NEA and the audiences, not just the artistic director.”

Indeed, Davidson’s words encapsulated the many changes--some overt, some subtle--occurring among the nation’s several hundred regional theaters.

Clearly, the nation’s cultural landscape is being transformed. The NEA, so crucial to the founding of the regional theater movement three decades ago, is being challenged like never before and regional theater heads are now taking a lead position in the fight to preserve the endowment. Yet beneath the armour of feisty combativeness inspired by that controversy, many theater insiders also expressed concern--even doubt--about the future of nonprofit theater. Several of them characterized the regional theater movement founded as a non-commercial alternative to Broadway as being at a crucial juncture today--a transformation of the theater’s original nature and purpose.

And the four-day conference--sponsored by the Theater Communications Group and entitled “The Artist’s Role in a Changing World”--also addressed such industrywide issues as multiculturalism, declining subscriber audiences and the role of governing boards. However, onstage and off, the discussions were dominated by talk of the NEA.

Ever since North Carolina’s arch-conservative Sen. Jesse Helms ignited a national furor over federally funded photo exhibitions, the debate over the future of the NEA has focused on visual artists. Now, that attention appears to be shifting as the nation’s not-for-profit theaters take center stage in the fight to preserve the endowment. A national grass-roots media campaign supporting the endowment is being launched by more than 300 regional theaters across the country. While the move marks a new activism on the part of theater artists, it is also seen as potentially polarizing a fragmented arts community already divided over its response to the ongoing NEA debate.

Indeed, when NEA Chairman John Frohnmayer two weeks ago rejected the first endowment grants earmarked for theater artists since the controversy began, the move triggered protests from theater directors and artists across the country, as well as from the NEA’s own theater panel. The denial of federal arts funds to the four performance artists--Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, Tim Miller and John Fleck--was made by Frohnmayer over the recommendation of the theater panel members who denounced the decision and urged its reconsideration.

Even before Frohnmayer’s actions, the nation’s not-for-profit theaters had been among the most vocal of arts groups opposing congressional attempts to curtail the NEA. Joseph Papp, producer of the New York Shakespeare Festival and one of the endowment’s most outspoken supporters, was the first arts leader to refuse an NEA grant in protest earlier this summer.

At the TCG conference--the largest gathering of theater figures in the country--a resolution was unanimously adopted calling for “a national media campaign . . . to combat the threat to our freedom of expression.”

“Theater has been the most aggressive wing of those arts groups fighting to save the NEA,” said Robert Falls, artistic director of Chicago’s Goodman Theater and president of TCG, the umbrella organization for nonprofit theaters. “But now with these (theater grant) grenades lobbed in our front yard, this is becoming a much, much larger issue and theater must be even more aggressive than opera companies, orchestras and museums in leading the fight to save the NEA.”

Indeed, the launching of the media campaign embodied a growing mood of advocacy by the 440 theater directors, artists and board members gathered in this New England town. “Normally at these conferences we have tended to chastise ourselves because we don’t matter,” said Arvin Brown, artistic director of New Haven’s Long Wharf Theater. “But this year our attitude seems to be changing. We don’t feel so unimportant anymore.”

It was an attitude mirrored by other conference attendees. Charles Mee, a historian and playwright, gave a keynote address that urged artists to “jump into a nasty political fight and bite back.” South African playwright Athol Fugard spoke of the “need for a peaceful revolution” to combat the “neo-barbarism that is alive in the U.S.” John Dillon, artistic director of the Milwaukee Repertory Theater, spent most of the conference collecting funds for Harvey Gantt, who is running for Sen. Helms’ Senate seat. And many theater directors--who were being urged by TCG staffers and arts lobbyists to follow the actions of Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum and accept their NEA grants “under protest”--were startled to discover that the Oregon Shakespeare Festival was the first regional theater to follow Papp’s lead in refusing NEA funding.

“We’re a Shakespeare Theater operating in a conservative town who would censor us?” said artistic director Jerry Turner about his theater’s decision. “But there was a strong consensus that it might come to that, so we refused the grant.”

However, it was the remarks given by Herb Chao Gunther, executive director of San Francisco’s Public Media Center, an advertising agency specializing in consumer rights and social issues, that seemed to most galvanize--and divide--the participants. Gunther, who has worked on behalf of such organizations as Planned Parenthood and Handgun Control Inc., urged the use of “responsible extremism” in defending the NEA. It was after Gunther’s address that the call came for a national media campaign funded by TCG member theaters and probably employing Gunther.

“At first, I thought we were preaching to the converted here,” said David Emmes, producing artistic director of Costa Mesa’s South Coast Repertory Theater. “But (Rep.) Dana Rohrabacher (R-Lomita) is from our neighborhood and anything we can do to thwart his attempts to close the NEA is good.”

But there was some dissent about the approach being taken by the assembled theater community.

“We are preaching to the converted here, but that is unfortunately necessary,” said another director privately. “The number of people here who still don’t understand what to do (about the NEA) is ridiculously high.”

While the implementation of an advertising campaign was unanimously endorsed by conference participants, it also set off alarm bells among a handful of managing directors who cautioned that a nationwide, grass-roots media attack might conflict with current lobbying efforts dominated by the powerful, Washington-based American Arts Alliance. Such a move, said the directors, could result in considerable political fallout--an exacerbation of the existing schism within the arts field, a division one director characterized as “that battle between safe and unsafe art.”

Indeed, some directors characterized the proposed media campaign as symptomatic of the frustration voiced by many TCG members--most of whom do not belong to American Arts Alliance--over the compromises and conciliation tactics practiced by the Washington group. That organization created a furor within the arts world last year when one of its board members publicly stated that the NEA “could live with” the congressionally mandated restrictive language.

“The times have changed and our tactics have to be different now,” said Roche Schulfer, managing director of the Goodman Theater and an alliance board member. “Hence our Chicago plan.”

Using a $25,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation, the League of Chicago Resident Theaters has initiated a direct-mail campaign protesting proposed NEA changes to 100,000 local theater subscribers. “Illinois is home to some of the most influential congressmen involved in the NEA debate,” added Schulfer. “And we couldn’t wait for (the alliance) to move.”

“Theater people have been a vocal minority in (protesting existing lobbying efforts)” said Edward Martenson, managing director of Minneapolis’ Guthrie Theater.

“And I think we have to be extremely careful that we are not seen as being divisive and put into the same category as NASAA,” he added, referring to the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies--the organization that was virtually ostracized by the arts community when its executive director, Jonathan Katz, recently supported proposed legislation to distribute the majority of NEA funds through state arts councils.

Peter Zeisler, TCG executive director, applauded the new lobbying efforts, but cautioned that “the issue isn’t simply the NEA--it’s bigger. For four days we’ve been talking about empowerment and what are we going to do about it.”

Indeed, the conference did address other issues, several of which were raised by internal critics. Two additional resolutions drafted during the conference called for condemnation of “the discrimination against lesbian and gay artists,” and elimination of “racism in the American theater.”

Multiculturalism was the second hottest topic at the conference, at which almost all the participants were white. Arena Stage’s new minority artist outreach program in Washington was cited as a potential model for increasing multiculturalism at regional theaters. But several directors insisted that similar, earlier efforts had been largely ineffective in broadening either a theater’s identity or its ability to reach new audiences. Milwaukee Rep’s John Dillon said after those efforts are concluded, “. . . we see no real impact.”

Indeed, the changes and declines in federal arts funding are only one of several unforeseen challenges confronting regional theaters. Foundation and corporate subsidies are also on the decline and are increasingly coming with strings attached; subscriber rolls are generally static and aging; costs, however, continue to escalate. In addition, as regional theater heads into its second generation, a new conflict has risen--securing the next round of artistic directors and figuring out how to foster their vision within a large-budget business run also by a managing director and board of trustees.

“Artistic vision is not written in stone,” said Doug Wager, the new artistic director of Arena Stage, one of the nation’s oldest and largest regional theaters. “Maybe five years from now we will all be sitting here remembering when we were nonprofit.”

Added one instructor from Yale University’s prestigious drama school: “One of the more discouraging signs of the times is that we are no longer seeing the best students going into theater. Those students are going to film school or law school.”

One of the conference’s liveliest and most well-attended discussions focused on the issue of how to maintain a theater’s artistic vision during times of transition. It was a discussion punctuated by the appearance of Anne Bogart, the artistic director of Rhode Island’s Trinity Repertory Theater who recently and unexpectedly resigned over a financial disagreement with her board of directors. “My board didn’t understand that it takes a couple of years for these kinds of (artistic) transitions to work,” Bogart said.

Ironically, many of the movement’s pioneering leaders, including Bogart’s predecessor Adrian Hall, Lloyd Richards, Robert Burstein and Zelda Fichandler, were conspicuous conference no-shows. And even among the new generation of artistic directors--a list that includes Des McAnuff at La Jolla Playhouse, Garland Wright at the Guthrie Theater, Jack O’Brien at the Old Globe and Mark Lamos of Hartford Stage--all were represented by managing directors.

Another notable schism: the growing gulf between Manhattan-based theaters and those stages scattered across the country. “(TCG) is a good organization, but it doesn’t relate to us,” said one of the conference’s few New York-based artistic directors. “We in New York feel like we are still in the trenches, facing many different issues--real estate prices, competing theater audiences--than regional theaters are.”

One of the conference’s least discussed topics: the blurring of that line between commercial and nonprofit theater. The transferring of productions from regional theaters to Broadway--which used to incite some artistic directors to accusations of “selling out”--has become, if not commonplace, certainly frequent. The latest example is August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson,” a production whose Broadway producers include the Yale Repertory Theater and the Mark Taper Forum.

“What we can’t get away from is that we are a 19th-Century art form operating in the 20th Century,” said Josie Abady, artistic director of the Cleveland Playhouse. “And we are all looking for ways to make an impact.”