Call it a Friday night massacre: On the evening of May 2—just hours after the Trump administration released a proposed budget that would entirely eliminate the both the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), among dozens of other federal agencies—hundreds of arts organizations of all sizes and kinds across the U.S. received emails from the NEA withdrawing pending grants and terminating existing ones, in amounts ranging from $10,000 to $100,000, earmarked for production costs, educational programming, new-work development, artists’ pay, and more.
Without variation, these missives included this explanatory statement:
The NEA is updating its grantmaking policy priorities to focus funding on projects that reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the President. Consequently, we are terminating awards that fall outside these new priorities. The NEA will now prioritize projects that elevate the Nation’s HBCUs and Hispanic Serving Institutions, celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence, foster AI competency, empower houses of worship to serve communities, assist with disaster recovery, foster skilled trade jobs, make America healthy again, support the military and veterans, support Tribal communities, make the District of Columbia safe and beautiful, and support the economic development of Asian American communities. Funding is being allocated in a new direction in furtherance of the Administration’s agenda.
American Theatre heard from dozens of theatre organizations about these sudden withdrawals over the weekend, and we are gathering more information on the scale of the damage as we report (please reach out to at@tcg.org if your grant was cancelled). What seems to be the case from our reporting so far—and from that of other publications—is that these cuts were sweeping, affecting grants for everything from new-play festivals to large resident houses, from edgy alternative venues to Theatres for Young Audiences and classical theatres, without regard to mission or merit.
One telling sign that the supposed new grantmaking criteria in the boilerplate language above are likely a smokescreen for an across-the-board policy of destruction: Of 148 grants offered last fall to various theatre projects, the one that could definitely be characterized as going to a “Hispanic Serving Institution,” the Chicago Latino Theater Alliance, also received a notice last Friday rescinding a grant of $20,000 to support the next iteration of Destinos: Chicago International Latino Theater Festival.
The response from theatres—some of whom had awards withdrawn that had been offered and announced but never fully contracted, others of whom had existing grants “terminated” mid-stream, and many of whom got notices of both kinds—has been swift and strong. Portland Playhouse in Oregon, which had a $25,000 grant to support a production of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone withdrawn just 24 hours before the show’s opening night, quickly replaced that money by reaching out to donors, and today announced a new statewide GoFundMe fundraising campaign called Keep the Story Alive: Oregon Arts Rising to recover the $590,000 in NEA grants lost in total by all Oregon arts organizations, and to distribute those funds evenly across the affected groups.
“This is about more than a show,” said Portland Playhouse artistic director Brian Weaver. “It’s about what happens when we stand together to say what we’ve always known to be true: The arts are kept alive by the community that surrounds them; we will not let our stages go quiet.” He concluded, “Let’s show the nation what happens when Oregon refuses to stay silent, and let’s remind them that the arts are worth fighting for.”
In yet more distressing news, today the NEA’s 10 remaining directors of disciplines—i.e., the heads of different grant categories—announced that they had accepted offers to “leave the agency through the Deferred Resignation Program or, if eligible, retirement,” to quote the resignation letter from
Other reports have indicated that the endowment is facing a 50 percent staff reduction overall. How the NEA will continue to function and administer and distribute any grants going forward remains to be seen. The endowment’s FY25 budget is $210 million—roughly .0031 percent of the federal budget.
Shock and Loss
Meanwhile, stories from theatres who’ve had awards withdrawn and/or terminated have poured in. Jesse Berger at New York City’s classics-oriented Red Bull Theater said the $20,000 hole left in their budget was “sadly not a surprise given what this administration has been doing for the last 100 days. It’s a lot like The Government Inspector, but not funny.”
Another NYC-based theatre, National Queer Theater, reported a canceled grant of $20,000, with artistic director Adam Odsess-Rubin commenting, “Artistic censorship is a horrible feeling. I hope every theatre company and artist in the country fights this injustice.”
Playwright Beto O’Byrne’s company Radical Evolution was set to develop its first Off-Broadway commission with an NEA grant of $50,000, also rescinded. “Whether or not that commission continues is in serious jeopardy,” said O’Byrne.
In the Bay Area, San Francisco International Arts Festival, New Conservatory Theatre Center, American Conservatory Theater, and TheatreWorks Silicon Valley were among the orgs that lost grants. TheatreWorks Silicon Valley artistic director Giovanna Sardelli reported the withdrawal of a $10,000 grant to support the company’s Core Writers Group, which consists of emerging and seasoned Bay Area theatre writers, including 2025 Tony nominee Jonathan Spector. “It is disheartening and infuriating that vibrant artistic voices are being sidelined due to funding that we are told is now ‘being allocated in a new direction in furtherance of the administration’s agenda,’” Sardelli said.
Said playwright Elisa Bocanegra, whose L.A.-based company Hero Theatre lost not one but two grants, “While I wasn’t surprised, I’m hurt…I run a mission-driven theatre that services women and children in shelters, and artists who have been (beyond) harmed by working in American theatre. I created an environmental initiative to help educate and heal. Wow, this hurts.”
On social media, playwright Patrick Gabridge commented that new-play development got “a kick in the teeth” from Friday’s NEA grant decisions, citing funds taken from Seven Devils Playwrights Conference, the New Harmony Project, and the Great Plains Theatre Commons (GPTC). “Not a shock, but it still hurts. So many didn’t make it through the pandemic, and now this.”
Indeed, GPTC received its rescission message just weeks away from its annual New Play Festival, to be held May 25-31. The company had already been spending funds with a reasonable expectation of reimbursement on a $35,000 award that was announced in January, and in normal times would have reached them by February or March.
“The NEA withdrawal of funding to arts organizations across the country is devastating on many levels for the organizations affected and the communities they serve, but it’s also another step in our deepening national crisis,” GPTC artistic director Kevin Lawler said in a statement.
In the D.C. area, theatres and artists confirmed to have been notified that they lost NEA funding included Mosaic Theatre Company, Round House Theatre, Signature Theatre (though it already received its funding for its production of In The Heights when they received the notification), the IN Series for its production of Ethiopia, Atlas Arts Lab, Chesapeake Shakespeare Company (CSC), and Julianne Brienza, the founder of D.C.’s Capital Fringe.
Chesapeake Shakespeare Company (CSC), was also hit with a loss close to showtime, in their case $50,000 for the company’s Shakespeare Beyond touring shows, which they offered for free to more than 8,000 people in a dozen Maryland neighborhoods last year. Though the company had already decided not to apply for the same grant for 2026, CSC founding artistic director Ian Gallanar said that CSC was “obviously saddened by the NEA’s decision. Right now, we are scrambling to hold our 2025 summer season together, and figuring out where to go from here.”
Creede Repertory Theatre of Colorado has been receiving grants from the NEA since 1974, which have helped the small theatre in a “tiny frontier town” of 400 residents build educational touring programs for rural and remote communities. Artistic director Emily Van Fleet reported that the $20,000 grant to support its Headwaters New Play Program was withdrawn. The program commissions, develops, and produces new American plays and amplifies the voices and culture of the San Luis Valley of Colorado and the rural Southwestern U.S. for audiences of all ages. With or without NEA funding, Van Fleet said, “We will continue this vital work.”
In Atlanta, True Colors Theatre Company had a $25,000 grant rescinded for the production of a new bilingual play by Darrel Alejandro Holnes. They also have $43,000 still remaining to be paid (out of a $75,000 total award), which was to be distributed for reimbursement for a new-work development program for Black theatres across the country.
At the Classical Theatre of Harlem, the NEA unexpectedly rescinded critical funding for CTH’s upcoming summer production, the East Coast premiere of Will Power’s Memnon. This puts at risk not only free public performances that reach more than 30,000 audience members annually, but also hundreds of jobs for artists, crew, and local vendors, and an estimated $600,000 in economic impact for Harlem. The company has launched an emergency fundraising appeal and invited the public to join its “Hold ’Em in Harlem” annual gala fundraiser at the Renaissance Harlem Hotel Ballroom on May 22.
“This isn’t just a line item—it’s a devastating blow to the working artists, small businesses, and Harlem families who count on this production every year,” producing artistic director Ty Jones said in a statement. “This is a fight for cultural equity, artistic freedom, and the soul of Uptown.”
For NYC’s Public Theater, the loss of funds for programming at Joe’s Pub and for free Shakespeare programs like the Mobile Unit and Public Works “isn’t the end of the world,” conceded executive director Patrick Willingham, given the theatre’s budget size. But he knows that for many smaller companies, and for the field at large, the “downstream philanthropic danger is as bad as this rescission,” particularly for organizations that rely on matching private funds with public money.
More importantly, Willingham takes seriously what the cutting of funding for the arts “says about our country, and the value of a healthy democracy. This is actually at the core of who we are, and the signal this sends—we should actually be quite frightened. At least until this moment, there has been a federal commitment to support the arts; it has been shaken and tested in the last few decades, but there was at least an understanding that funding the arts and the humanities is crucial to our democracy. I’m not making this up—that’s in the language of how the NEA was created.” This attack on that fundamental principle, he said, “is more than a shot across the bow—it’s a torpedo into the engine room.”
Some companies have lost grants that had already been reduced from earlier expectations. Jenni Werner, artistic director of the New Harmony Project in New Harmony, Indiana, said that the company applied for funding for their annual writers residency, which takes 25 writers to New Harmony for a 10-day residency, as well as for an annual play festival that they run in Indianapolis. When they were offered $40,000, Werner said they decided “to reduce the residency, which is what we have gotten funding from the NEA for decades,” and to significantly reduce the fall festival. “NEA staff urged us to make that simplification and to focus on one project.”
They’re still going forward with the residency in a couple of weeks. “We’re not cancelling it,” said Werner, who admitted she hasn’t been expecting to receive the money since Trump’s inauguration and has been seeking alternative funding sources. Still, the way last week’s sudden cancellation was handled “seems like an insult,” she said.
At New Paradigm Theatre (NPT) in Connecticut, funds for a new production of Hairspray were withdrawn, leaving them in need of an additional $10,000 and making this year’s gala, themed as a “Live Taping of the Corny Collins Show,” hit harder. NPT artistic director Kristin Huffman called the funding loss “a gut punch. Our production costs exceed $62,000, and this gala is our main fundraising event. We hope our supporters and newcomers to NPT will recognize the importance of our work and join us for an enjoyable evening.”
There have also been international ripples. Australian theatre company Fairly Lucid Productions was preparing to board Fiji Airways Flight 870 to travel to and perform Ben Noble’s play Member (about the murders of gay men, including UC Berkeley student Scott Johnson, in Sydney, Australia, in the 1970s and ’80s) at the San Francisco International Arts Festival this week, when they discovered that the NEA had pulled a $20,000 grant the endowment had promised to fund their performance as part of the festival. The grant was first offered last November—and then pulled in the middle of the two-week festival that it was awarded to support.
Festival director Andrew Wood struck a defiant note in a statement. “Trump will not stop us,” he said. “The festival is happening and we are moving forward regardless. Everyone has their visas and their plane tickets; they are coming here to join us and the show will go on.”
Wood zoomed out to add, “Our grant is just a very small part of a much bigger overall picture. What Project 2025 imagines is a gutting of this country’s democratic institutions and the First Amendment rights that go with them. They have chosen to attack the arts community as one way to achieve this. But they have made a big mistake. We will coordinate with other sectors and fight back—and we will win.”
Advocacy efforts thus far are focusing not only fundraising but on challenging the withdrawals of the funds on legal and procedural grounds. Those who received termination notices were given seven days to appeal the decision (not seven business days, just seven days, which included last weekend). Advocates are encouraging those impacted to appeal and to file the final financial report by the noted deadline, as termination letters noted failure to do so “may result in your organization being ineligible for future National Endowment for the Arts funding opportunities.”
Theatre Communications Group (which publishes this magazine) will host a 90-minute webinar on these developments on Thursday, May 8, at 1 p.m. ET.
