City Won’t Take Action Against Playhouse in ‘Sister Mary’ Flap

The City Council, on the advice of the city attorney, will not take any immediate action against the Costa Mesa Civic Playhouse over its production of the satire “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You,” which some residents have branded “anti-Christian bigotry.”

But that did not save the council from some needling at its meeting Monday meeting by local arts activists, who presented a check for $3.72 to the city’s general fund. The activists said that amount represents the share of city arts grants paid by residents John and Ernie Feeney who have led the attack on the play.

The protest was organized by members of the Long Beach/Orange County Committee of the National Coalition for Freedom of Expression. As group member Michael Carr read a statement lambasting the city for a number of recent actions affecting the arts community, other members took up a collection among themselves for the amount of the check.

“The council has fostered an illusion that artists are a band of unsavory criminals that have donned the title to rob the city coffers and create and peddle smut at public expense,” Carr read from the statement. “We wonder why the council has chosen to attack the arts.”

After Carr read the statement, about 25 members of the coalition withdrew from the council chambers as they recited the First Amendment.

Later in the meeting, individual residents spoke for or against the production. Among them was John Feeney, who reiterated his charge that the play is “an exercise in religious bigotry.”

The council took no formal action other than to listen to public comments and to receive the city attorney’s report.

In Christopher Durang’s caustic 1979 play, an overzealous nun drills Catholic dogma into a young student, and she eventually shoots two former pupils. Productions of the play have sparked controversies in a number of cities.

Several local residents, led by the Feeneys, charged last month that they believe that the production violates a clause of the city’s cultural arts grants agreement that forbids the use of city funds for “religious activity.” The playhouse has received $20,000 in arts grants from the city this year, and another $9,400 grant is pending.

Councilwoman Sandra L. Genis asked the city attorney’s office to investigate the charges. City Atty. Thomas A. Kathe found last week that the city has no grounds to demand repayment of city funds from the theater company.

“Although the choice . . . by the playhouse is of questionable taste,” Kathe wrote, “the use of public grant monies on a theatrical production which questions the value of parochial school education does not violate the restrictions on the use of funds set forth in the California Constitution.”

Kathe concludes that the “primary purpose of the play appears to be secular and not sectarian.” The play ended its sold-out run Sunday.

The Feeneys, longtime city residents, pushed Costa Mesa into the national debate over public arts funding when they complained in June about a South Coast Repertory flyer calling for support of the embattled National Endowment for the Arts.

The council responded by delaying the distribution of $175,000 in cultural grants to 13 groups to investigate whether SCR had used any city money to print or distribute the flyers. The funds were later released, but the council eventually adopted new language on arts grants forbidding the use of city money for “obscene matters” or “religious or political activity.”

Although the language is considerably less restrictive than that proposed by the Feeneys, activists attacked it as requiring a “loyalty oath,” and the Orange County chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union criticized it as too vague.

The “Sister Mary” controversy offered the first test for the new restrictions.