Denied by the NEA, Enter the LATC : Stage: The center gives $5,000 commissions to performance artists John Fleck and Tim Miller, whose applications to the NEA were turned down.

Los Angeles Theatre Center has ventured where the National Endowment for the Arts wouldn’t go.

LATC has commissioned new works from John Fleck and Tim Miller, two of the four solo performance artists whose applications for NEA fellowship grants were rejected in a controversial decision by NEA chairman John E. Frohnmayer in June.

“The purpose is to replace the endowment funding we feel they should have had,” said LATC artistic director Bill Bushnell on Tuesday, at a press conference attended by Fleck and Miller. The LATC leadership was “distressed” by Frohnmayer’s action, he said.

The Los Angeles-based artists will receive $5,000 each for the creation of hourlong works. The results may be presented as companion pieces at LATC next year.

Frohnmayer’s decision to overturn the recommendations of an NEA panel to award grants to Fleck, Miller, Holly Hughes and Karen Finley raised a storm of criticism that the chairman was acting out of political reasons rather than artistic ones.

“We felt it was important to stand up and state very clearly that the kind of overheated rhetoric from the reactionary right could not be allowed to intimidate an institution that has made its reputation from being a leader,” Bushnell said.

The money “will come from places like the Shubert Foundation’s $40,000 grant (to LATC) for the creation of new work and from other unrestricted funds” that have been given to the theater for new plays, workshops and festivals. The work might be seen as early as next March, during the theater’s annual Festival of Premieres, but as with any LATC-commissioned work, Bushnell added, there is no guarantee that the work will ever be presented on the LATC main stages.

City money that pays for the maintenance of LATC facilities will not be used to support these commissions, nor will any money from the LATC’s own recently announced $65,000 grant from the NEA, Bushnell said.

He added that a question about the NEA money was “premature” because LATC has not announced whether it will accept the grant. He indicated that chances for a grant rejection, similar to the one announced last week by the New York Shakespeare Festival, were slim, but the final decision will not be announced until later this week, he said.

Asked why the other two Frohnmayer-rejected artists, Hughes and Finley, were not also awarded grants, Bushnell said it was because they are not Los Angeles-based, as are Fleck and Miller. “That’s Joe Papp’s responsibility, or Harvey Lichtenstein’s,” he said, referring to the leaders of the New York Shakespeare Festival and the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, the home town of Finley and Hughes.

Bushnell also “talked with” Rachel Rosenthal, a Los Angeles-based performer who rejected her own $11,250 NEA grant in protest against the denials of grants to the NEA Four. Why not also reward her?

“First, she made a choice,” he replied. “I applaud that act, but it’s a different philosophical act on my part as to whether I should replace (the money she turned down).” Also, he added, Rosenthal wanted “substantially more than $5,000,” and her request “was too rich for our blood.”

Rosenthal was traveling Tuesday and could not be reached for comment.

Miller said the LATC commission “is the most practical and helpful thing that has happened” since Frohnmayer’s decision. He said artists are now trying “to find ways to re-authorize not the NEA but their own internal missions.” But he is also interested “in seeing people get the dough and stick it in people’s faces.”

Miller’s new piece “begins with me being thrown hundreds of feet in the air after crashing into a Thai food delivery van on my scooter, where I hover over Los Angeles regarding this strange basin and share visions of a scary future, a handspring by the sea and political transformations through homo/sex,” said the artist in an LATC statement.

“All four of us went through this period of being called anti-American,” Fleck noted. He said that he hopes “to get in touch with my concern with American values” in his new piece. “Using Mark Twain’s river in ‘Huck Finn’ as the core, I will detail my current personal midlife crisis and that of American society as the new millennium approaches.”