Playwright Tony Kushner Speaks Out Against Elimination of the NEA

As BroadwayWorld reported yesterday morning, as many have feared, the the Trump administration's budget plans will indeed eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities- the first time this has been proposed since their creation in 1965.

Many celebrities are speaking out against the news, one of them being playwright Tony Kushner, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America was written with the help of an NEA grant.

He tells the Guardian: "I really hope that the Republican Congress doesn't go along with it. We spend $400m on military marching bandsand $145m on the NEA, in a country of 319 million. They're woefully underfunded. It's a completely empty gesture: we're talking about a $1.1tn budget, and a savings of a few hundred million dollars - a negligible amount."

He continues: "The vision that is more and more clearly looming is that we're not looking at an attempt to set up a fascist state. We're looking at a decisive victory, in a battle that's been going on since before the civil war - really since the founding of this country - for the states' rightists."

Click here to read the full interview.

The Tony Award winning National Endowment for the Arts was created by an act of the U.S. Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government. It's purpose is to promote and strengthen the creative capacity of communities by providing all Americans with diverse opportunities for arts participation. Click here to learn more about how the National Endowment for the Arts benefits theater across the country.