The National Endowment for the Arts is scheduled to announce a decision by the end of this week on how they plan to enforce new language added to their grant guidelines in February,  mandating all applicants commit to disavowing “gender ideology,” per the language of the Trump administration’s executive orders. (A timeline of the process leading to the recent ACLU lawsuit can be found here.) At the same time, rumors continue to swirl about whether they’ll be the next federal agency to be stripped down to the studs by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), who have already come for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute for Museum and Library Services. 

The recent fight to protect transgender and nonbinary artists and, more broadly, artistic freedom at the NEA, has been led in significant measure by theatre companies. I spoke to Artistic Directors Marissa Wolf of Portland Center Stage and Josh Hecht of Profile Theatre in early March, after the lawsuit was filed but before the injunction was granted and then lifted. A lot has changed since then and there’s almost certainly more upheaval to come, but both asserted repeatedly that the war isn’t over yet.

“There’s no one way to fight”

“The work we do is endemically tied to who this theater company is, how we show up in this community, and how we create belonging,” says Wolf. “And it’s intrinsic to who we are. There’s no retrenching, there’s no disavowing, there’s no backpedaling. It doesn’t work that way. This is the work. This is how we center humanity. Period. The end. So the question becomes: how do you show up for the fight?”

On March 5 – the day before the ACLU of Rhode Island filed their lawsuit against the NEA on behalf of Rhode Island Latino Arts, National Queer Theater, The Theater Offensive, and Theatre Communications Group – the Public Theatre in New York City published an open letter on their social media protesting the new prohibition against “gender ideology” in Trump’s executive orders. It was co-signed by three other theatre companies, including Portland Center Stage (PCS). The letter states: “We are confident in the legal foundation of our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives and remain steadfast and collectively committed to advancing this work. We will continue to uplift the work of transgender, non-binary, and queer artists and offer all our venues and programs for their stories. We will not endorse or agree to the NEA guidelines that seek to suppress or limit those efforts.”

Wolf says that when she saw the NEA’s announced changes, her first response was a sense of something like grim inevitability: an attack on arts and culture she’d figured was probably coming, but hadn’t anticipated so soon (the first wave of grant guideline changes came mere weeks after the inauguration), and which was disingenuously phrased as a set of minor procedural tweaks instead of a massive shift in mission. 

She’s in regular communication with artistic directors of other theatres across the country and serves on a planning committee with Oscar Eustis, Artistic Director of the Public Theatre, through the PNTC (Professional Nonprofit Theater Coalition), which was created during the early days of the pandemic to advocate for federal theatre funding in all fifty states. Eustis was one of its co-founders, alongside leaders like former Oregon Shakespeare Festival Artistic Director Nataki Garrett and former Woolly Mammoth Artistic Director Maria Manuela Goyanes. 

Wolf knew Eustis to be a strong advocate for federal arts funding, so when PCS was approached by the Public to be an early signatory to their open letter, she didn’t hesitate. While the Public led the process, Wolf describes the other two co-signers – Jacob Padron of Long Wharf Theatre and Patricia McGregor of New York Theatre Workshop – as active contributors to the crafting of the language. “I feel very honored to be in that group with those leaders,” she says. “That’s a club I’ll be part of any day.”

Theirs wasn’t the last theatre coalition taking such a stance. On March 18, another coalition of theatre companies – including Aurora Theatre Company, Crowded Fire Theater, Golden Thread Productions, Killing My Lobster, New Conservatory Theatre Center, Playwright’s Foundation, San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Company, Shotgun Players, and Z Space – issued a joint statement in support of the ACLU and plaintiffs, reiterating the lawsuit’s claim that the new terms of compliance “not only threaten the freedom of artistic expression of countless U.S. citizens, but are unconstitutional and in direct violation of the NEA’s purpose as legislated by Congress. The endowment was structured with specific assurances that the standard for grants would be ‘artistic and humanistic excellence,’ that decision-making power would rest in the hands of experts in the arts and away from the influence of government, and that the agency’s policies and practices would reflect ‘the high place the nation accords to the fostering of mutual respect for the disparate beliefs and values among us.’”

Many of these artists find themselves wondering what to do with NEA funds if they arrive with strings attached – the question of who can afford to give the check back for reasons of principle is a thorny one. Wolf explains that community solidarity among theatre companies has to acknowledge the varied realities they each face. Most NEA grants are in the $10,000 – $30,000 range, but that dollar amount means different things to different people. Both she and Hecht cite the multimillion-dollar Guthrie Theatre, who recently returned their NEA funding, as an example. “For larger regional theaters like Portland Center Stage,” Wolf explains, “our budget is around $8 million. That $30,000 won’t make or break us.” It might be crucial towards supporting a particular project and boosting its national visibility, but in the grand scheme of their overall economic picture, it’s a sacrifice they could afford if they had to. She acknowledges, however, that that’s not universally true: “For many incredible organizations across our state, that is make or break. When you think about particularly smaller indie companies, rural companies, that is [the determining factor] in whether you get to do a project or not. That is what that money is.”

“I can feel sort of two camps forming,” Hecht agrees. He references both the Guthrie and the Playwrights Center in the first category: those who are financially able to return even a sizable NEA grant to take a principled stance against accepting their dollars while these policies are in place. He echoes Wolf’s assertion that the choice to turn down the funding is easier for big organizations, though he respects that the people who can are doing so. “I think it’s an incredible statement to make,” he says. “[But] there’s another camp that I think is saying, ‘The most subversive thing we could do is take their money and keep our programming. Sign what they want us to sign, but don’t stray from our actual principles, and continue doing the good work that we’re doing.’” 

Hecht describes this as the “Paula Vogel camp,” referencing the acclaimed playwright whose 1990 play Hot ‘n’ Throbbing was written in direct response to the anti-obscenity restrictions which Congressional Republicans led by Senator Jesse Helms imposed upon the NEA. He describes the stance of the theatres who signed onto the Public’s letter as a bit more nuanced than the Guthrie’s. “They don’t say, ‘we’re not taking the money,’” he points out. “Or ‘we’re not applying,’ or ‘we refuse this money.’ They just say ‘we won’t stop doing the work that we’re doing.’ That feels like a subtle distinction.”

Hecht tells me about the new works they’ll be developing next season with their 2025-2026 playwrights, nonbinary playwright Jen Silverman (a 2022 NEA Creative Writing Fellow) and Asian-American playwright Mike Lew, which will center the stories of marginalized communities whose voices are rarely heard onstage. One piece they’re working on with Lew, for example, will explore themes of masculinity among young Asian-American men, developed with a cast of nonbinary Asian-American artists. “If we turned down the NEA and canceled this festival,” he says, “there is no one else… who would do a piece like this. And those artists would not have the opportunity to perform in this piece publicly, to work with a writer of national repute like Mike Lew on it. Those things would all go away. And so I have to think about that too.”

Wolf references a conversation with longtime colleague Jacob Padron of Long Wharf Theatre about effective organizing and coalition-building, in which he explained the importance of flooding the field with a wide and diverse range of both messages and messengers. The ACLU lawsuit is one tool, open letters are another, and returning grant funds is a third. Because the attacks of the Trump administration are themselves many and varied, not all states, cultural communities, or populations experience their impacts in exactly the same way. This makes it important to remember, as Wolf reminds me more than once, that “there is no one way to fight right now. People are showing up in all different ways, and every single way is important.”

Working within the system

Wolf and Hecht, both longtime arts workers who go way back with the NEA, say they’ve always had really good relationships with agency staff. Despite his frustration with the lack of communication around their currently stalled grant, Hecht speaks highly of Ian-Julian Williams, the NEA’s Theater & Musical Theater Specialist, and says they’ve always had a positive relationship. Wolf praises outgoing NEA chair Maria Rosario Jackson as just one example of the many, many people she’s worked with and admired there over the years who have “fought tooth and nail for funding” under circumstances which have always been fraught with challenges. “It is clear to me, in the twenty years that I’ve been in this field professionally, that we have had major advocates at the NEA who believe in this work,” she says. “There have been thrilling major, major projects in the American theater that received funding first from the NEA.”

I asked Hecht if he felt that trust had been broken between him and the agency as a whole, given everything that’s happened, and he said he wasn’t quite there yet. “I think if Trump did what he’s doing with the FBI or other agencies and he purges the NEA of actual arts administrators and installs loyalists, I think that would break my trust,” he says. “I think I have enough faith in the bureaucrats who are there that we’re ultimately on the same side, because they’re the same people who for the last decade have been asking us to do the opposite of what they’re asking us to do now. And I don’t think they’ve had a change of heart, right? So my trust isn’t broken there.” 

He points out that the “deep state” against whom Trump rails continuously – which includes many public employees and bureaucrats embedded in federal agencies with a lot of heat on them right now – operates best when they’re able to do their work discreetly, without drawing attention to themselves. “That kind of quiet resistance can be really effective,” he says. “That’s why there’s part of me that thinks we actually need both. We need the people who have – one word for it is ‘privilege’ –  the support and the structure to say, ‘I refuse.’ And we need the people who are going to quietly resist. And both have different ways of being effective.”

Wolf feels the fight has to continue on all fronts, no matter what happens, and that looking beyond the NEA for arts support is vital for the industry’s survival. “I think it’s not enough to simply wash our hands of the NEA,” she says. “I think we have to stay engaged with the conversation, and we have to make our voices heard.” The goal of the PNTC is to work within the federal government to build the same kind of partnerships with nonprofit professional theatres that they have with other industries like steel, tech, and auto manufacturing. It led the charge for the Save Our Stages Act and the Paycheck Protection Program loans which helped keep many theatres from closing their doors during the pandemic. Neither of those were funded by the NEA. 

Wolf speaks glowingly of Oregon House Representative Suzanne Bonamici, who is “indefatigable in her support of the arts and specifically arts education” and “puts her money where her mouth is” in advocating for Oregon artists. She was responsible for introducing one of PNTC’s most ambitious offerings into the House: the 2024 “Supporting Theater and the Arts to Galvanize the Economy (STAGE) Act,” a five-year, $1 billion commitment from the Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration, offering grants of up to 20% of a theatre’s total annual operating expenses. It was endorsed by the AFL-CIO as a huge boost to union arts workers and supported in the Senate by Peter Welch of Vermont, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, and Jack Reed of Rhode Island. She says the PNTC hasn’t given up on it, and are still working to figure out how to reintroduce it in another format which might get traction “even living inside the world we’re living in right now.” In fact, she points out that reframing conversations about arts and culture funding by emphasizing theatre as an economic driver can make bipartisan conversations about it easier. “We’re part of the federal workforce,” she says, “so we must advocate for access to those dollars.”

It’s also important for arts organizations of all stripes to have access to the wide range of other federal grant programs out there, from education to capital improvements. Wolf laughingly refers to it as a classic theatre “yes, and” – while the NEA is important and deserves robust funding to administer their grants freely, there should be other venues for funding available too. Taking the arts and culture sector seriously as an industry which employs large numbers of people and pumps millions of dollars into the economy means exploring new options for how the federal government could support it, and Wolf says those efforts can’t grind to a halt every four years as administrations transition. The work has to keep moving forward. 

“We will never comply”

Derek Goldman, artistic and executive director of the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown University in Washington, is blunt about the risks of American “cultural isolationism,” a desire to be left alone to do our work and have our creative spaces protected while opting out of full participation in other pressing issues going on in the world. “There’s the adage that authoritarian regimes understand the power of the arts and of narrative sometimes better than the artists themselves,” he says. “Artists haven’t always been socialised to think of themselves as belonging at the table when critical issues of society and policy – whether they’re about migration, climate, gender issues – are being navigated . . . If we’re to take seriously our role as storytellers, as cultural workers, we have to be aware that we are needed in those spaces. Sometimes we’re going to be invited in; sometimes we’re not. This is a time to not be defeatist and capitulate but in fact these periods are times where artists step up and take the lead.”

The fact that right-wing attacks on gender identity were the reason the NEA ended up in court is proof that art gets politicized whether artists want to engage with politics or not. “[Donald Trump] cited drag shows at the Kennedy Center as the reason why he believed he needed to take over,” Adam Odsess-Rubin of lawsuit plaintiff National Queer Theater told the Guardian, “so LGBT issues are not at the periphery of these attacks on artistic freedom and civil rights in the United States. They’re at the very core of it. It’s a generational battle over how we talk about gender, how we talk about identity, how we embrace or reject diversity, whether we move towards a more progressive and inclusive society or a more repressive and conservative one.”

There’s a strong case to be made, however, that no matter what the future holds for the NEA as an agency – or for the grant dollars currently held in limbo by the administration – a lot of damage has been done already that can’t be walked back overnight. I ended up getting pulled into one such story a few weeks ago, taking a little side quest outside ArtsWatch’s geographic jurisdiction to chase down an interesting story in Los Angeles which – while it has a happy ending – shines a light on some of the dangers that come from tying grant funds to aspects of human identity.

On March 28, a friend forwarded me an Instagram story from an LA drag queen named Pickle, Executive Director of an organization called Drag Arts Lab (as well as the “drag laureate of West Hollywood,” an absolutely incredible title), suggesting that there might be an interesting story for me to chase down. As it turned out, there was. Drag Arts Lab had been booked for a drag story hour event by the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) as part of the annual LA Festival of Books. But a DCA staffer had abruptly canceled the appearance, explaining to Pickle via email that funding for the festival came from an NEA grant program called The Big Read, and “I am told that this performance could jeopardize the entire grant, given the current restrictions on DEI.” 

As a queer person, and a fan of drag artists, I would have been interested in this story regardless. But as someone who has spent the past several months deeply immersed in the minutiae of NEA grant policy, it was immediately clear to me that somebody somewhere was not telling the truth. The NEA’s argument from the very beginning – in their published grant guidelines, in their webinars, in court – has been a vague insistence that they are simply following the law. Grants for The Big Read were awarded last June, and grant recipients have been asking and asking and asking whether the new set of guidelines published for this year’s grant cycle were being applied retroactively to grants that had already been awarded. The answer, from every NEA staff member I’ve found so far, has been somewhere on the spectrum of “we don’t know” or “we’re working on getting you that information” or “we’re waiting for Legal to tell us how to proceed.” To the best of my knowledge, absolutely no one had definitively been told anything like “fire your drag queens or we can’t cut your check.” If the DCA’s story was accurate, they would be the first. 

This was also happening during the week the NEA was waiting for the judge to rule on the ACLU’s demand for an injunction, which would have made it even more noteworthy if an NEA staff member from The Big Read really had gone rogue, explicitly threatening funding before a judge had even decided how they were supposed to proceed.

I reached out to the DCA’s media liaison Juan Garcia via email on March 31. I explained who I was and a bit about the research I’d been doing in following the continuously unfolding NEA story. I also told him that I’d spoken with Pickle and that what she’d been told – that the DCA’s whole grant would be jeopardized by her presence – was a massive outlier as far as how the NEA was communicating with grantees, and asked to speak to the staff member who had had that conversation with their program officer to get a clearer sense of what exactly the NEA had said.

Garcia called me back on the afternoon of April 1, and we had what I can only describe as a bizarre and confusing conversation. I wasn’t able to record it, but in summation, he said that it turned out this actually had nothing to do with the NEA and was simply a scheduling mixup, which they’d already reached out to Pickle to explain. (I got no reply to a follow-up email asking how many other organizations were also caught up in that scheduling mixup, or if Pickle had been the only participant to be canceled.) Garcia insisted that no one at the DCA had spoken to anyone at the NEA at all, and someone had misspoken in relaying that to Pickle. When I mentioned the email, he denied any emails had been sent, and said these had all been verbal conversations. He seemed surprised when I read him the email, which stated quite explicitly that the sender “had been told” about the NEA grant requiring the cancellation of Drag Story Hour, and was totally unable to explain it or answer any of my questions about it. The conversation ended with Garcia asking me a number of questions about my NEA research, including whether I’d ever spoken to any other local government agencies about the status of their grants. I told him that in fact I’d just recently spoken to the Oregon Arts Commission, who receive substantial NEA funding through their pass-through grants to states, and they’d told me the same thing I was hearing from everyone else: that no one at the NEA had anything to tell us yet.

Pickle confirmed that she did get an email blaming it on a mixup (which she didn’t believe any more than I did), but pointed out that the timing was pretty fishy, coming after her story began circulating on social media and the DCA began getting pushback from the LA queer community. The whole situation left a really bad taste in her mouth; she pointed out that the email was both speculative and preemptive (emphasizing that the NEA could pull funding, not that they had), and that it contradicted the whole mission of the DCA as a city arts agency. She was grateful for the immediate support of the LA queer community, but frustrated and disturbed by the implications of the DCA’s seeming willingness to throw drag artists under the bus to preserve their grant funding. She also felt (candidly, so did I, and I said as much to Garcia) that given the nationwide landscape of attacks on drag story hours or other programming in which drag artists work with children, it was a bit insulting to her intelligence to attempt to pass the thing off as a scheduling mixup the minute public criticism began to roll in. Through her community engagement work at Drag Arts Lab, she says she’s “no stranger to the frontline of censorship and the nuanced ways in which entities will silence LGBTQ+ programs while maintaining that they are supportive. I’ve heard all the excuses,” she told me. “The difference here is that the DCA said the quiet part out loud.”

There is a lot here which is opaque and muddy. I do not know, and cannot prove, whether someone at DCA simply saw a news headline about the NEA lawsuit over gender identity, panicked, got out over their skis, and decided to distance themselves from programming that might be considered controversial in the current political climate. I do not know, and cannot prove, whether they assumed that simply pointing to the Trumpian takeover of the NEA would be enough to silence any troubling questions, and perhaps did not realize that, to a grantwriter, their cover story had a significant number of holes in it.

What I do know, and can prove, is that in the end they decided to do the right thing. I was thrilled to receive an email from Pickle on April 10 with the following statement attached: 

“I am happy to say that I spoke with the General Manager of the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA), Daniel Tarica, and we had a productive conversation regarding the recent email that the department sent about my participation in the LA Festival of Books. The DCA has invited me back to their booth at the LA Festival of Books, and I have agreed to join them to deliver our Drag Story Hour program for youth and families. Next week, I will join another member of the newly formed LGBTQ+ Arts and Humanities Coalition to meet with leadership at the DCA and we will discuss strategies so that, all together, we can navigate the coming years and better serve our communities in the face of unprecedented cuts and attacks. I appreciate the support my community has shown, and I also appreciate the DCA’s dedication to civic engagement and progress. I believe in the DCA’s commitment to support the art of drag and the LGBTQ+ community, and I look forward to our future collaborations as well as working to connect fellow drag artists with the DCA’s existing and future programs and opportunities. There is a great deal of progress to be made, but that is the nature of our work and we must always celebrate the victories that we make together.”

Do not obey in advance

The reason this story matters is that the cascading aftereffects of this NEA shakeup extend way beyond the confines of each individual grant. It’s also about how people behave when there hasn’t been a real threat yet, but they imagine that there will be. The first rule of historian Timothy Snyder’s oft-quoted book On Tyranny is “Do not obey in advance.” Hecht explains that experts on global democracy use this kind of self-censorship as a bellwether; once groups like artists, scientists, and activists become afraid to speak out for fear of drawing themselves to the attention of the federal government, “that’s how you know you have moved into an authoritarian space.” 

He vividly remembers the strain on artists and arts organizations under the first Trump administration, but says something feels new this time, describing a system-wide failure to adhere to the norms which protect federal agencies and intense frustration with a Congress that has the power to shut down DOGE (or at least curb its excesses) and hasn’t used it. “I’m watching this showdown on whether or not Congress will approve some kind of continuing resolution for the next six months, and I think, ‘this is all theater,’” he says in frustration. “He’s not releasing the funding anyway. He has decided that he’s going to fund only the projects that he personally believes in, regardless of what senators and congresspeople vote on. And that level of cynicism is new for me. I have never felt that before. The last time, I was calling Lisa Murkowski every day and leaving a message, but I believed that if she voted the way I wanted her to vote, that would be that, right? And I no longer believe that.”

He also acknowledges that his own safety calculus as a queer Jewish person in Trump’s America is a factor that has shifted how he engages personally online; during the first Trump administration, he recalls posting daily 5-minute actions, like congressional call scripts, on his social media. Now, while he still makes those calls, he’s more conscious of what is or isn’t safe to post about, with surveillance of progressive activists on the rise. The changing landscape affects his thinking on who benefits and who’s at risk if a theater like the Profile decided to make a big visible statement like the lawsuit plaintiffs, the Public, or the Guthrie. 

It’s messy and complicated, and there are no easy answers. “There’s part of me that thinks it’s important to make a statement,” he says. “And there’s another part of me that thinks, yes, but if then we all shut down and can’t do this work, who have we benefited from our statement? And I don’t know the answer to that. I think that everyone has to find their way through those choices, and there’s value to any one of them.”

He also expresses a frustration I’ve heard echoed in many progressive online spaces: that not everyone is exactly clear on the limits of what an executive order can make you do. “The statutes around the NEA actually specify that we serve underserved communities,” he says. “That is the law, actually. And it’s interesting to see the culture responding to these executive orders as if they are the law – as if they must be complied with – and they’re not, [but] the media treats it like that. Like, ‘This is the new guidance.’ Well, it’s the new guidance. It’s what he wants. But the actual federal law around the NEA says the NEA must fund rural communities, must fund underserved communities, must fund minorities, in the words of the 1970s. I think that if they did pull back funding because of [defying the executive orders], they would lose in court. 

“Now, whether a nonprofit has the resources to go through that is another story,” he adds, “[but] it seems like there’s a pervasive culture among federal agencies to assume that they must comply with executive orders. We see that everywhere from, you know, Elon Musk sending emails and people responding to them, or Elon Musk saying ‘I need access’ and people granting it when they’re not legally required to do that. So it would make sense to me if these executive orders came out, and the NEA raced to figure out how to exist within them, as they would with any normal executive order that came out under a more centrist president of either party, without taking the time to say, ‘is this actually illegal? And if it’s an illegal executive order, am I required to do something about it or not? Or do I wait until the courts figure out whether this order is legal or not? Or do I have to just proceed until the courts tell me otherwise?’ That’s what it feels like to me.”

I attended Profile Theatre’s annual “Light the Way” gala on March 14, just a week after the ACLU lawsuit was filed. In his appeal for contributions from the supporters in attendance, Hecht was frank about the pressures of continuing to produce ambitious, progressive work in the current political landscape; but the mood in the room was far more defiant than despairing. “For the last decade, we have centered the stories of the global majority,” he said, “and we will keep doing so, despite Executive Orders requiring them to be scrubbed – despite new guidelines from the NEA requiring that we ‘comply’ with those Executive Orders to receive federal funding. We will never comply.”

The line got a standing ovation.