Act I, Scene 1. Jack steps before the judge to defend his reasons for stealing the goose that lays golden eggs from the Giant, who lives atop the Beanstalk. The judge listens patiently and soon, the Giant has a chance to explain why he felt entitled to eat Jack.
This scenario belongs to a little morality play performed for tens of thousands of school children last year in Maryland, Virginia and Washington. The play contains no nudity, violence, or profanity. Its wholesome lesson on tolerance could hardly be called controversial. And yet this is precisely the kind of program that will cease to exist if the new Republican-controlled Congress pares the budget for the National Endowment for the Arts to the bone -- or does away with the 29-year-old agency altogether.
This adaptation of "Jack and the Beanstalk" is produced by Library Theatre, a Bethesda-based nonprofit organization that receives approximately 10 percent of its annual $330,000 budget from the NEA and the Maryland State Council for the Arts (which is also an NEA beneficiary). Without these funds, "we couldn't survive," says its managing director, Margie Dean Gray. It costs Library Theatre $1,000 to produce each performance, but each school where the six-member company performs is charged just $460. The shortfall is made up each year mainly through private foundations, Montgomery County, and the NEA.
The $5,000 grant awarded directly to the theater from the NEA in fiscal 1994 "may not sound like a lot," says Ms. Gray, "but to us it's the difference between staying open or not." This economic predicament is not unique to Library Theatre. Dozens of community arts organizations around the state could be in dire jeopardy a year from now -- and the quality of major institutions, such as the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, severely compromised.
While no one knows for sure exactly what will happen in the new Congress' first 100 days, there is a clear rationale driving proposed cuts in the NEA's budget. Small-government advocates, including the incoming Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, Republican of Georgia, and House Majority Leader Dick Armey, Republican of Texas, have argued for years that non-essential government services ought to be privatized to make government leaner and more efficient -- while reducing the tax burden on the average citizen. And now, with long-sacred entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare under scrutiny, it seems that government's fundamental mission may be narrowed. In the process, marginal concerns, including the arts, are likely to be cast aside.
The problem with this logic is that it doesn't truly correspond to reality, and doesn't even make much sense politically. Backers of NEA, with its $167 million budget, say it is among the most successful, cost-effective agencies to come out of the Great Society. The agency consumes a relatively small portion of the federal budget each year while creating jobs, services and tax revenue.
Locally, the Republican position makes even less sense in hard economic terms. Statewide spending on the arts has a domino effect, touching everyone from baby-sitters to laundry and parking attendants.
"Balancing the budget on the backs of the NEA is like going on a diet by clipping your fingernails," says an NEA spokesman, Josh Dare. "The great fear is that the cuts will become an act of symbolism."
Symbolic or not, the local impact of deep cuts will be very real, and quickly felt.
The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra stands to lose $225,000 in direct NEA support. If large reductions go through, warns Executive Director John Gidwitz, "Baltimore cannot afford to maintain a great orchestra. We are talking about the survival of the BSO as a great artistic organization, nothing less."
The Baltimore Museum of Art, which receives roughly half a million dollars in federal support, would also be put in a difficult position. If the Federal Indemnity Program -- a sub-agency of the NEA that is little known outside the art world -- is eliminated, the BMA will not be able to afford self-insurance on some imported exhibitions. "It means that we may find ourselves paying tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional premiums that very well may mean the death knell of major traveling exhibitions coming the U.S.," says BMA Director Arnold Lehman.
A Center Stage trustee, Nancy Roche, predicts the theater company would be forced to make cuts to balance its budget if it loses the $135,000 it now receives from the NEA. That amount, says Ms. Roche, "would be extraordinarily difficult for us to make up from current sources, and so it is enormously significant to us, and we take it very seriously."
Republican leaders have tried to cast this debate in dollars-and-cents terms. But beneath that veneer of common sense runs a dark current of thought that has coalesced into a tug-of-war over national values. It's not so much what art costs that's at stake, but what art means -- a sentiment that has local art leaders just as upset as the threat of canceled funding.
"Arts spending has nothing to do with the federal budget," says the BSO's Gidwitz. "The ideology is to eliminate government funding for culture. The code word is 'privatize,' but the agenda is 'eliminate.' "
"Art will always exist," says Eliot Pfanstiehl, president of Maryland Citizens for the Arts, "but funding determines who gets to see it. Cut the funding, and you cut access."
Until reality takes shape sometime next year, none of the state's leading arts organizations has a specific plan of defense, beyond lobbying congressional representatives for mercy. It is difficult to contemplate the worst, and no organization wants to undertake significant cutbacks sooner than it must.
"None of us can truly conceive of some of the more drastic alternatives, such as de-authorization of the National Endowment," says Mr. Pfanstiehl. "It's like saying Ford Motor Company is going to disappear. Who believes it? It's almost too horrific to believe."
Sadly, even if the NEA survives as a shell of its former self, it appears inevitable that thousands of school children in the coming years will be deprived of the pleasure of watching Jack, the Giant, and the judge engage in a lively and colorful debate over truth, justice, and the American way.
Amy L. Bernstein is a free-lance print and radio journalist in Baltimore.