Bigger Slices of a Smaller NEA Pie

The recently announced National Endowment for the Arts grants brought widely varying results for Southern California theaters.

Most of the area’s theater companies that received grants got more money than they did last year, despite an overall 44% drop in funding for California NEA grants.

But several smaller theater companies that had received annual NEA grants for years got nothing this year.

Center Theatre Group, whose Mark Taper Forum has generally been the single biggest Southland beneficiary of NEA theater funds, fell to third place this year, winning $50,000 for its upcoming “Common Ground” epic, scheduled for 1999. The Taper got $70,000 last year.

But the Taper will also benefit indirectly from another NEA grant; it is co-producing Anna Deavere Smith’s upcoming project on the press and the presidency, which received $125,000 in NEA money via Washington’s Arena Stage, where the show will be presented first, before coming to the Taper.

Leaving aside grants for such co-productions, this year’s list of NEA gifts to Southland stages was topped by San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre, which won $75,000 for the development and West Coast premiere of Bonnie Lee Moss Rattner’s “To Gleam It Around, To Show My Shine,” a project adapted from a Zora Neale Hurston novel and tentatively scheduled for production next January. The Old Globe got $68,000 last year, for “Play On!” Old Globe development director Domenick Ietto said that while the theater is grateful for the increased support, “we can’t lose sight of the fact that the level of dollars is only a third of what it was a few years ago.”

Next in line was Santa Monica’s Cornerstone Theater, whose individual grant shot up from $7,000 last year to $70,000--for a commission to playwright Chay Yew (who also runs the Taper’s Asian Theatre Workshop) for a work to be presented at the Pacific Asia Museum. Cornerstone also will benefit from a $125,000 NEA grant, routed via San Francisco’s A Traveling Jewish Theatre, for a consortium of seven ensemble companies that hope to tour their work to each other’s cities.

Among the other local companies that got increases in NEA funds this year were South Coast Repertory ($60,000, for “Our Town,” up from last year’s $50,000); La Jolla Playhouse ($40,000, for Jessica Hagedorn’s “Dogeaters,” up from $28,000); San Diego Repertory ($40,000, for Rick Najera’s “A Quiet Love,” up from $18,000), We Tell Stories ($30,000, for “The Village of Liver and Onions,” up from $7,000) and Los Angeles Poverty Department ($20,000, for a collaboration with an unnamed local theater group, up from $5,000).

These grants were all from the “creation and presentation” branch of the restructured endowment. East West Players chose to apply in the “education and access” program and got $25,000, which is more than the $4,500 it received from the previous year’s theater program but less than the $40,000 it received from the previous year’s expansion arts program.

On the other hand, these companies received no NEA support this year: Bilingual Foundation of the Arts, Deaf West Theatre, Odyssey Theatre, Stages and the Fountain Theatre (which received its first and only grant last year). The Odyssey, Deaf West and East West submitted a joint proposal to simultaneously present separate dramatizations of the story of Joan of Arc, but the proposal was submitted one day too late and didn’t qualify.

Meanwhile, from the NEA’s “planning and stabilization” branch, the radio theater company L.A. Theatre Works got $100,000 to distribute cassettes of its recordings to students throughout the country.

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ATTENTION MALL SHOPPERS: Cornerstone Theater Company hardly relies only on the NEA. It received the largest single grant in its history--$150,000--from the James Irvine Foundation in order to tour its site-specific, mall-based, after-hours productions “Everyman in the Mall” and “Malliere” to three Southern California malls in 1997-1999. The tour also will include a new 20-minute play to be performed during shopping hours. Cornerstone wants the malls to be located in different regions and to feature at least two stories, since “Everyman” employs an escalator and elevator. Information: (310) 449-1700.

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“EXPECTATIONS” EXPECTED: A Noise Within will bring back “Great Expectations,” the production that won four of this year’s Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle awards, during the holiday season, Dec. 4-21.

An earlier plan to make last year’s “A Christmas Carol” an annual tradition is temporarily on hold, but artistic co-director Art Manke said that “Carol” may return in 1998, when the classical company hopes to be in expanded quarters on a higher floor of the same Glendale building. “Carol” made a little money for the group last year on its three-stop tour to the Alex Theatre and other larger venues in Lancaster and Redondo Beach, Manke said, but aesthetically those theaters were too big--”our audiences love the intimacy of a three-quarter thrust stage.”

A Noise Within’s repertory next season will include “Richard III,” “Design for Living” and “The Learned Ladies” in the fall and “Volpone,” “Buried Child” and “TheSeagull” in the spring of 1998.