A Letter From Our Executive Director on NEA Cuts

Sunday, May 4, 2025

Dear Friends,

You may have heard that the current presidential administration has cancelled a number of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Oakland Theater Project was among the nonprofit arts organizations that received notice on Friday that one of our grants, $30,000 to support the world premiere production of an adaptation of Moby Dick in 2026, would no longer be funded.

These cuts impact arts companies throughout the Bay Area, and across the United States. You can read more about the impacts to some of our local arts organizations in these recent pieces from KQED and the San Francisco Chronicle.

The NEA was founded in 1965 as part of Lyndon Johnson’s vision for The Great Society. Its founding principle was that the arts are essential to the health of an open society, and that the American government should help sustain that necessity.

Today, culture is squeezed on both sides: subsumed by the market on one end and, now, by the state on the other. Nonprofits, whose mission is embedded in their very name, offer a public service without the purpose of making a profit and without being subservient to state propaganda.

We may not attend the arts often. We may not attend the arts at all. But they need to exist. Their existence is essential to an open society.

This is why the NEA’s shift in focus to "arts that celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence" is so troubling. It not only kneecaps arts organizations already struggling to survive, but it also strikes at something deeper. The organizations that celebrate, facilitate, and practice free expression are the ones that keep an open society alive.

When these organizations are no longer supported for their capacity to challenge power, but are instead asked to celebrate it, the open society begins to close.

Nonprofit arts organizations are the heralds at the gate—keeping it open.

Oakland Theater Project has now lost not only $30,000 from the NEA, but, just weeks ago, also a $25,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for similar reasons.

These losses are real. And we could use your help.

If you are able and willing, your support would mean a great deal.

Support Oakland Theater Project

But this is also bigger than any one organization. So we humbly ask that you support free expression by giving to any local arts organization today, whoever that may be.

Oakland Theater Project was founded out of the conviction that theater is essential, not only as art, but as a place of forging and deepening compassion, connection, and community. It is also a place that can reveal truths the government may prefer to ignore and, in doing so, speak truth to
power.

In this spirit, we recently produced I Am My Own Wife by Doug Wright, a play about a trans woman surviving repressive regimes. We are currently producing Ironbound by Martyna Majok, a play about an immigrant surviving economic destitution. This play opens tonight, and it is not to be missed.

Alongside producing work that speaks to our moment, I believe we must also make the case for theater itself. As it happens, I’ve been attempting to write a book (or let’s call it a series of essays, because god help me, that sounds a little less pretentious), trying to articulate what I cannot help but fervently believe: that theater is essential to a healthy democratic society.

The series is called A Crisis of Seeing: The Case for Theater, and the first chapters are now available on Substack.

Theaters across the country are folding. Too often, we see this as separate from the erosion of democratic norms, civic trust, and the rule of law. But I believe the decline in our culture’s valuation of theater is deeply connected to the decline in democratic values. This writing is my attempt to make that case.

I’m aiming to update the Substack once a week, whether with:


It would mean the world to me if you joined me in this journey. You can subscribe at the link below (it’s free!) — and even comment if you so desire. I hope you’ll share your thoughts, questions, quandaries, arguments, and experiences.
 

'The Seeing Place' on Substack

Theater is the seeing place. It is the act of paying attention to one another in shared time and space. It is the act of attending to one another. And only through attending to one another and to our world is meaningful change possible.

Thank you for being part of our community. If you’re able to support Oakland Theater Project or another arts organization you love, it would go a long way at this time.

We are because of you.

Michael Socrates Moran
Executive Director, Oakland Theater Project

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