Papp Rejects the NEA Again : Grants: Congress softens obscenity stand, but producer says artists are still vulnerable.

In what may signal a new kind of trouble for the National Endowment for the Arts, New York theater producer Joseph Papp said Thursday he will reject $323,000 in NEA grants despite action by Congress scrapping most content controls on endowment-funded work.

At the same time, however, CalArts in Valencia said that because of the recent congressional action, it would resubmit to its board for reconsideration a previously undisclosed decision--reached Oct. 8--to reject $43,000 in NEA grants.

CalArts officials said they would closely follow policy developments at the NEA in the near future and could still turn down the money.

Papp scheduled a New York press conference to announce his latest NEA grant rejection. He said he planned to call NEA Chairman John E. Frohnmayer and inform him of the decision before he met with reporters.

In April, Papp turned down $49,000 in NEA funding to the Festival Latino of his New York Shakespeare Festival, declaring that obscenity-control wording in the NEA’s 1990 appropriation bill amounted to an unconstitutional incursion on artistic freedom of expression.

In a telephone interview early Thursday morning, Papp said he was taking the new action because supposedly content control-free NEA legislation passed just a week ago still leaves artists dangerously vulnerable to action by what could become a government “arts police.” Papp’s decision Thursday was the largest single rejection of NEA money since the controversy began last year. Since then, more than 30 grants totaling more than $750,000 have been turned down.

Congress recently approved bills appropriating $180 million to the NEA this year and extending its life three more years. The new legislation removes last year’s obscenity restriction, substituting a requirement that the endowment recoup funds if a grantee’s work is found obscene by a criminal appeals court.

The legislation, however, also includes a provision some attorneys and even one of the bill’s key congressional sponsors have branded as possibly unconstitutional. It requires the NEA to put regulations into effect to make certain grants will not support indecent work or art that shows disrespect for American values.

“Do you think that the NEA is going to sit quietly by and not scrupulously examine, re-examine, test, investigate every damned kind of application?” Papp said. Frohnmayer, he said, “is not going to want to be in the position where one of his grantees gets to the courts. What you are going to have here is a kind of an arts police setup. All of the buzzwords are there. Decency has replaced obscenity . Neither of them can really be interpreted.

“They are going to have to find various ways to catch it before it gets out into the marketplace. They will mercilessly pursue those areas. The author will be at his typewriter, having just written, ‘She walked in through the door and . . .’ and an NEA investigator will come in and say, ‘And what? You’d better figure it out by the end of the day.’ ”

The turmoil that has beset the NEA for the last 18 months, Papp contended, has irreparably damaged the agency. “I knew that the NEA would never be the same and it cannot be the same. I will have no association with it.”

When Papp rejected his first NEA grant in April, he received an almost immediate private gift replacing it from television producer Mark Goodson. Papp said Thursday he is not sure how he will replace the recently rejected $323,000 but that he was concerned that many corporate donors who have traditionally supported the arts may be concluding that arts grants are too sensitive and open to political assault to warrant continuation of corporate arts programs.

CalArts President Steven D. Lavine, expressing a sentiment that appeared to be widespread in the arts community, said artists and arts institutions across the country will closely watch policy decisions made at the NEA over the next several days and weeks for signs that equilibrium is returning to the troubled agency.

The positions by Papp and Lavine appeared to indicate that a mood of wariness--not relief--had settled over much of the arts community. While many arts leaders were relieved that Congress did away with the most restrictive content controls over the NEA, Lavine and other observers said the new NEA legislation includes provisions that could lead to radical restructuring of the NEA.

“In the changed circumstances, we have to reconvene the executive committee” of the board, Lavine said. “There is obviously the potential (in the new laws governing the endowment) to improve the workings of the NEA,” by streamlining procedures and ending controversial practices like the obscenity certification, he said.

“But there is equally the potential to distort those workings badly. I think the whole arts community is waiting to see what happens.”

Lavine and Papp said a meeting of the NEA’s advisory National Council on the Arts scheduled to begin today offers an opportunity to assess policy directions at the agency. The arts council meeting had been scheduled long in advance, but took on new significance after the action by Congress to approve, without change, an NEA reauthorization bill most observers had presumed would be significantly altered.

The meeting, which is to conclude Saturday afternoon, may consider whether the NEA will continue to require that grant recipients sign an anti-obscenity certification before receiving funds.

While the $323,000 Papp turned back Thursday represents only a small part of his $14-million annual budget, such announcements have become an important aspect of symbolic protest against the NEA’s political enemies, led by conservative politicians and religious groups.

NEA 1990 appropriation legislation that expired at the end of September included a provision barring the endowment from supporting obscene work, especially projects that include sadomasochistic or homoerotic subject matter.

With a flair that has characterized Papp’s seven-month crusade against NEA content restrictions, the producer said he would take out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times today to further espouse his position. The ad, an advance copy of which was obtained by The Times, takes the form of a facetious memorandum to the NEA from “Agent A101,” an NEA “cultural examiner” who reports to Frohnmayer on his investigation of indecent content in plays by Shakespeare, Bertolt Brecht and other dramatists to be presented this season at Papp’s Public theater.

The ad, which concludes, “The correspondence above is imaginary, but the threat of censorship is real,” also solicits season subscriptions to Public Theater productions.