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Wounded in the culture wars
By Corey Fischer Mill Valley - I was recently invited to the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. to receive an award from the Fund for New American Plays for "See Under: Love," a play I adapted from a novel by the same name by David Grossman. For someone who's been struggling in the trenches of non-commercial theater for over 25 years, the call from D.C. was heady stuff, and I felt extremely grateful for the recognition. While in Washington, I paid a visit to another institution to which I feel an enormous debt of gratitude: the National Endowment for the Arts. A Traveling Jewish Theatre — the non-profit theater I helped found and still co-direct — would probably not have survived for over two decades had it not been funded in its formative years by the NEA. When I stepped out of the wrought-iron elevator on the seventh floor of the old post office building on Pennsylvania Avenue, I was confronted with tangible evidence of what it means to be on the front lines of the so-called culture wars. File cabinets and conference tables line the hallways. Piles of records, grant applications and videotapes are stacked wherever there's an inch of space. The office quarters have been reduced by more than one third of the already modest size they'd reached in "the good years." When I met with staff members, we sat on a well-worn sofa and chair squeezed between several cubicles. One key program officer couldn't join the meeting because of the enormous work load she's carrying. In addition to space, the National Endowment for the Arts lost more than one third of its staff and nearly half its budget when it became a political football between 1992 and 1996. The good people of the NEA, like residents of a besieged city, do what they can to maintain a sense of normality. They screen applications, organize site visits, develop new initiatives, meet with artists, lay people and members of Congress. And, yet, I leave convinced that the situation is anything but normal. It is not normal for the leaders of a great democracy to turn against one of the most basic human impulses: the creation of art. Historically, all societies that have done so have been equally hostile to any expression of human freedom. This animus toward art is often couched in the argument that in the absence of government support, the market will best determine what kind of art should be nurtured. In fact, the market supports art that is marketable. Such art may be of high quality. It may satisfy our needs for entertainment or diversion. But art-as-product rarely provokes, challenges or innovates. In the 1930s, when public support for the arts was generous and broad, artists created a body of work that became part of America's deep cultural memory: the photos of Dorothea Lange, the songs of Woody Guthrie, the theater of John Houseman and Orson Welles. In the 1960s and '70s, government support, through the newly created NEA, helped support a vital legacy in the form of institutions like Lincoln Center, the Guthrie Theater, the Public Theater, scores of museums, creative writing programs and a national network of neighborhood arts programs, resident theaters, symphonies and dance companies. As I sat among the cubicles and the overflowing files at the NEA, I began to fear for that legacy. I believe that the theater and other un-marketable art forms will persevere, one way or another. The need to create simply runs too deep to be extinguished by budget cuts. But, walking back through the overcrowded hallway, I wondered at all the dreams and hard work that lay buried in the piles of grant applications stacked along the walls. The chances that these nascent theaters, dance companies and musical groups will still exist 20 years from now are all too slim as long as our cultural future continues to be held hostage by politics.
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