Brief Filed Supporting Lewitzky Lawsuit

A coalition of more than 160 theaters, playwrights, directors, actors and theater figures has filed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting Los Angeles choreographer Bella Lewitzky in a lawsuit challenging an anti-obscenity certification imposed on grantees by the National Endowment for the Arts.

The petition was filed in federal court in Los Angeles earlier this week after the judge in the case rejected a motion by government lawyers to dismiss Lewitzky’s lawsuit. In the action, the choreographer, who turned down a $72,000 NEA grant earlier this year to protest the obscenity certification, seeks a ruling that the endowment requirement is unconstitutionally vague and interferes with First Amendment guarantees of freedom of expression.

In filing the friend-of-the-court brief, the New York-based Theatre Communications Group, which organized the action, said that it will also attempt to enter a related case in New York in which the New School for Social Research has asked for an injunction against the NEA certification process on grounds it amounts to a loyalty oath.

A judge is expected to rule almost any day in the New School case. The university is the institutional parent of the Otis/Parsons Art Institute in Los Angeles.

Joining in the brief were actors Colleen Dewhurst, Stephen Collins. Stockard Channing, Kevin Kline, Olympia Dukakis, Christopher Reeve, Ron Silver and James Earl Jones, as well as authors Ariel Dorfman, Terrence McNally and Eduardo Machado. Drama centers ranging from the American Contemporary Theater in San Francisco and the California Shakespeare Festival in Berkeley to the Arena Stage in Washington and City Theatre Company in Pittsburgh also joined in.