Austerity blues: it's wheat-from-the-chaff time.(Forum focus: local associations)

With each new day come additional signals that resources for the arts will be less and less for the foreseeable future. As of early April [2003], legislators in New Jersey, Arizona, Florida and Missouri have considered elimination of arts agencies in their entireties. Are there more to come? Foundation letters apologizing for "no new grantees" or advising groups to budget for smaller grants fill our in-baskets, and corporations continue to demand more visibility for ever fewer dollars. And while we all aspire to courage in our work, it is a time when the connection between funding and fear--one issue among the many powerfully articulated by Zelda Fichandler's "Whither (or Wither) Art?"--has never seemed clearer.

In short, our supporters are making hard, hard decisions, often to our disadvantage, and we are deluding ourselves if we believe these decisions are short-term ones. The talk in many circles is shifting from "temporary downsizing" to "rightsizing"--a suggestion that this is more than a temporary shadow, perhaps the beginning of an entirely new, fiscally austere chapter for the arts.

And so for us, too, this is a time of hard, hard decisions. As one arts leader said recently, "In a business where there is precious little 'fat' to cut (if any), we're moving beyond cutting to the bone to lopping off limbs. Basically, our options boil down to cutting the art and cutting people."

In a variety of forums, I have heard people making loud defenses of their own programs: "Producing international work is the moral choice in these times;" or "Supporting new work is the obligation of every theatre;" or "Arts education is the foremost responsibility every group must meet." I grow uneasy about these kind of absolutes: Are we suggesting that a group who chooses nor to play in the international sphere is immoral, that groups who do solely classical work are reprehensible, that groups who opt out of arts education are irresponsible? Clearly we as a field must support all of these activities (and more). This does not seem, however, commensurate with expecting that each individual theatre serve these various masters. Indeed, in a time of severely diminished resources, it may be impossible to serve multiple masters meaningfully. International work is a moral choice, new work an obligation, arts education a responsibility that an individual theatre may and perhaps should elect--but only in the large context of mission and values.

Indeed, the hard choices ahead require that every group be clear about which core priorities it will protect at all costs--a set of choices that will by necessity require some theatres to eliminate activities that fall outside this core. It is a time when what we protect will make clear our true priorities, will distinguish organic commitment from intellectual oratory, and will reveal which programs are indeed core, as opposed to those that have been ancillary, not only within individual theatres but within sub-communities of philosophical commitment.

I have, for example, ...