SCR Rejects Offer to Join Panel : Arts: South Coast Repertory has declined an invitation to discuss freedom of expression at a convention despite being a target in recent controversies.

Though his troupe has been a target in recent controversies over freedom of expression, a top official at South Coast Repertory has declined an invitation to discuss the topic as a member of a key panel at an important meeting of the state’s arts community this weekend.

Costa Mesa Civic Playhouse officials were also asked to join the panel, scheduled Saturday as part of the 15th annual convention of the California Confederation of the Arts, but had not made a decision Thursday and were given until today to respond, according to confederation associate director Ken Larsen.

Larsen said the failure to secure representatives from either organization would mean that planned discussion of recent arts controversies in Costa Mesa--the only Orange County issue on the conference agenda--would be deleted.

The convention began Wednesday and will continue through Saturday at Los Angeles’ Biltmore Hotel. More than 300 members of the state’s arts community are expected to attend. The confederation is the state’s largest arts advocacy organization.

Civic Playhouse board President Eleanor Rey said Thursday that the community theater’s officials are still considering the invitation, but that the distance between Costa Mesa and Los Angeles might make attendance “difficult.”

SCR producing artistic director David Emmes said Wednesday that while two SCR fund-raising officers will attend the convention, he had not received adequate notice of the panel (he said he thinks the confederation “tried to put this together too hastily”) and had been “completely unaware” of its specific nature when the invitation was relayed to him through SCR public relations officer Cristofer Gross. Gross said that he was contacted about the panel about 11 days ago, and had been unaware of its theme.

Larsen said he specifically told Gross that the panel was titled “The Fight for Freedom of Expression.”

Panelists Bruce W. Davis, vice president of the Arts Democratic Club in San Francisco, and Max Benavidez, vice president of Freedom of Expression for Pen Center U.S.A. West, an international writers’ organization, both said that they received Larsen’s invitation more than a week ago--which was adequate time for them to attend--and had been made well aware of the subject matter.

Others scheduled for the panel are Bella Lewitzky, director of the well-known Los Angeles modern dance company that bears her name, who has sued the National Endowment for the Arts over anti-obscenity restrictions; Cynthia MacMullin, director of the FHP Hippodrome Gallery in Long Beach; Patrick Scott, executive director of Los Angeles’ Independent Feature Project West, and Allan Parachini, a Times staff writer who covers the arts.

Larsen said that SCR officials have been “good, loyal members” of the confederation and that he could only assume that “some confusion” led to their inability to address the panel.

Meanwhile, Jeffrey Chester, a key arts activist who was involved in the early planning of the conference, has called SCR “spineless” and has charged that the troupe tried to “avoid confrontation” in July when the Costa Mesa City Council approved arts grant restrictions forbidding the use of city money for allegedly obscene matters, or religious or political activity.

The restrictions were proposed after a Costa Mesa resident complained that SCR, an annual recipient of city funds, had issued flyers urging support of the embattled NEA.

Chester, a political consultant and co-founder of the prominent, 2,000-member National Campaign for Freedom of Expression, charged that the Tony Award-winning repertory company had given into the City Council by rejecting his offer to organize a large protest at a council meeting. The protest, Chester said, would have helped publicize the fight against artistic censorship.

“In the morning (SCR) said yes, and in the afternoon they cancelled, and I really saw it as their fear,” Chester said.

He said he had offered to have an official from Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art and the heads of Los Angeles’ two leading theater companies--Gordon Davidson of the Mark Taper Forum and Bill Bushnell of Los Angeles Theatre Center--speak against the proposed grant restrictions at the council meeting.

“I thought it was important to have a number of important witnesses so the Costa Mesa City Council would know this was not just something internal to the city of Costa Mesa, but important for the region,” Chester said. “I also offered to give them free PR support, to contact National Public Radio” and other media across the country.

By refusing his offer, Chester felt, SCR was “trying to appease the City Council by trying to avoid confrontation. (But) it is incumbent upon the administration of arts organizations to not try to appease conservative critics to maintain arts funding. They have a moral responsibility to go out into the community and to the press and their audiences and explain why it’s important to fund a diversity of ideas.

“By going quietly along, (SCR thought it) could avoid restrictive ordinances, and it didn’t work that way. The SCR case is being talked about across the country among arts activists as a place where we lost and (one) that portends poorly for the future, unless we come up with some kind of political response that would nip these kinds of things in the bud.”

SCR’s artistic director, Martin Benson, spoke publicly to the council against the grant policy. But Emmes, who co-founded SCR with Benson, confirmed that he personally refused Chester’s help because he felt the situation did not warrant such measures.

“I think he was overreacting and I think the issue, in my view, had not reached a proportion of crisis that would require that kind of a response,” Emmes said.

He said the new Costa Mesa city grant policy--which the American Civil Liberties Union plans to challenge in court--is in fact “not a grant restriction” and, with respect to obscenity, merely restates California penal code forbidding smut. The policy, he said, “is no more damaging to freedom of expression” than the existing state law.

“I abhor obscenity . . . and I don’t think (the grants policy) has anything to do with freedom of artistic expression,” he continued.

He challenged anyone to “point out other organizations that locally have done more” to support the NEA in its battles for artistic expression.

Reminded that the Newport Harbor Art Museum was one of three arts organizations in the country to sue the NEA over its 1990 anti-obscenity certification, and that the Art Institute of Southern California in Laguna Beach--a small organization lacking SCR’s national recognition--rejected a $15,000 NEA grant, Emmes said, “Well, there’s two.”

SCR was among some 160 theater groups and artists to file friend-of-the-court briefs supporting one of the lawsuits, but it accepted a $112,500 1990 NEA grant.