South Coast Feeling Shortchanged

The drying-up of federal grant money from the National Endowment for the Arts is being felt in Costa Mesa, where the $40,000 grant for South Coast Repertory announced Wednesday is the theater’s smallest gift in nearly 20 years.

The grant, part of $20 million awarded to nonprofit organizations across the country for the first quarter of 2000, will help SCR produce “The Hollow Lands,” a new play by Howard Korder that runs Jan. 7-Feb. 13.

Organizations receiving grants in the first quarter are not eligible for further NEA funding during the year. SCR also received $30,000 from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays to help stage Korder’s play, which traces one man’s epic trek through the American wilderness during the 19th century. Korder received an additional $10,000 individual grant from the Kennedy Center to support “The Hollow Lands.”

SCR was the only Orange County arts organization to receive funding in the current round of grants.

Last year, the NEA awarded SCR $42,300 for its production of John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men.” The theater has seen its annual NEA operating grants decline steadily since a peak of $120,000 in 1993. This year’s grant is the smallest since 1981, when SCR received $32,000 from the arts endowment.

As a well-established regional theater, SCR, which has an $8-million annual budget, has a strong base of donors to cover the decline in federal support, said David Emmes, producing artistic director. But he is concerned for others who are not so lucky.

“For institutions that are younger and struggling, the diminished support has been extremely difficult and in some instances stifles artistic experimentation and risk,” Emmes said. “It has required arts institutions--less so at SCR--to have to look a little more toward the box office and therefore make choices that are a little safer. In the long term, that’s not healthy for the arts.”

SCR’s biggest boost from the NEA came in 1985, when it received a prestigious challenge grant of $350,000--an endowment gift rather than a grant for regular operations. That chunk of cash became the cornerstone of the theater’s acclaimed programs for developing new plays such as “The Hollow Lands.”

SCR has built a national reputation as a nurturing ground for new works. Since 1991 it has staged world premieres of one Pulitzer Prize winner (“Wit” by Margaret Edson) and four Pulitzer finalists (“Sight Unseen” and “Collected Stories” by Donald Margulies, “Three Days of Rain” by Richard Greenberg and “Freedomland” by Amy Freed.)

The NEA’s resources have plummeted since its funding peak in the early 1990s. A series of controversial grants to confrontational, hot-button artists and the advent of a Republican-controlled Congress after the 1994 election led to cuts in the NEA budget from a peak of $176 million in 1992 to its current plateau of $98 million in each of the past three years.

According to a press release from the NEA, President Clinton proposed a 53% hike in the arts endowment’s budget for 2000, to $150 million, but Congress balked at any increase and kept funding flat for the coming year. Given the erosion caused by inflation, flat budgets are tantamount to decreases.

Four other Southern California theaters received grants of $20,000 or more in the first of four rounds of awards for 2000: The Center Theatre Group/Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, $45,000 for its Millennium Project; the Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles, $20,000 for a production of Goethe’s “Faust”; the San Diego Repertory Theatre, $45,000 for world premieres of “The Mummified Fetus” by Luis Valdez and “The View from Here” by Bernardo Solano; La Jolla Playhouse, $30,000 for two new plays it has commissioned by Kate Moira-Ryan and Jose Rivera.

Major awards to other Southland organizations were: the Los Angeles Philharmonic Assn., $100,000 for its 2001 Stravinsky Festival; the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, $85,000; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, $80,000; the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, $70,000; the Southern California Institute of Architecture, $40,000; and the UCLA Film & Television Archives, $40,000 for a film exhibit, “The World and Its Musicals.”

Nationally, the NEA received 2,232 grant applications requesting $100 million and approved 820 grants totaling $20 million.

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Peaks, Valleys

South Coast Repertory’s annual grants from the National Endowment for the Arts during the 1990s.

1993: $120,000

1999: $40,000

Source: Times reports