The Playgoer: NEA

Custom Search

Thursday, December 14, 2006

NEA

Our National Endowment for the Arts has just released a bucket full o' money to a bunch of theatres. See here for a partial list, with a link to the complete.

I guess this is how the NEA works, but it's quite striking how many on the list are the big nonprofit theatres (McCarter, Guthrie, e.g.). And in NYC, Lincoln Center got a grant for Part 3 of the Stoppard! No doubt they were counting on it. But, given this influx of taxpayer dollars, they still make no apologies for the $100 tix?

In related news, Dana Goia has just been reappointed for another term as NEA chief. I haven't been following his tenure closely, I admit. But he seems the best we can hope for from this administration. At least with Democrats in power, he can get some bankrolling!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

In fairness to the NEA, when you click through to their site (there's a link in the Playbill article) the full list that pops up is pretty diverse, with plenty of smaller companies represented.

On a quick glance, it seems like a very good cross-section, actually.

The dollar amounts are on the low side, but that's the world we live in.

PeonInChief said...

One of my favorite SPY stories (does anyone remember SPY?) examined the grants given by the NEA during one of the regular right-wing "ohmigod, they're giving money for THAAAT" moments. The conclusion: most of the money went to the eminently respectable, the well-known and frequently to those who really didn't need the money at all. One artist, I remember, used his NEA grant to pay his taxes.