Portland Playhouse is shown. (Courtesy: Portland Playhouse)
On May 2, a Friday, hundreds of arts organizations across the country received an email from the Trump administration cancelling their National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grants. The administration attributed this change to a shift in “policy priorities to focus funding on projects that reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the President.” The nonprofit Oregon-based theater Portland Playhouse was one such institution. In Portland, a city whose arts ecosystem has always had a scrappy, DIY ethos, the Portland Playhouse, along with dozens of other cultural institutions, met the news with dismay, then action.
Brian Weaver, co-founder and director of Portland Playhouse, learned that his organization had lost $25,000 in government funding the day before the company’s production of August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone was set to open. The theater had received NEA grants for eight years straight and used the money to cover employees’ salaries — actors, carpenters, electricians. The grant termination was catastrophic for the small company.
Likewise for the rest of city’s stalwart theater community, which, following the Portland Playhouse’s lead acted quickly to find ways on the fly to mitigate what for some could be catastrophic funding shortages: starting grassroots campaigns, using social media to their advantage and mobilizing their audiences. Through these small acts of resistance, many organizations have started seeing positive results. “We posted online and said, ‘Our play opens tomorrow night, and the NEA just cancelled our grant,” Weaver said. “From that moment onward, everybody started reaching out. There were hundreds of messages of support, calls for support, donations. It was just an enormous show of solidarity and care.”
Lester Purry appears as Bynum Walker in Portland Playhouse’s 2025 production of “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.” (Courtesy: Julia Varga)
Opening night of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone was “electric,” Weaver said. “Nobody was talking about the NEA. Nobody was even showing any negativity. We were just celebrating the power of story, the power of culture, and the fact that they were trying to invalidate us and take away that story made it even more poignant.”
The grant terminations, sent from an unmonitored email, appeared in organizations’ inboxes just hours after Donald Trump proposed that several arts bodies including the NEA, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Institute of Museum and Library Services be dissolved as part of the administration’s 2026 discretionary budget list.
As arts organizations all over the country reeled from the news, many started looking for solutions. Like-minded organizations began to coalesce in direct response to the government’s actions last week,. “I was just on a call with hundreds of arts leaders around the country and we are being advised by legal teams to appeal the letter,” Weaver said of an initiative the nonprofit Americans for the Arts organized. These appeals, he explained, are the basis for further legal action.
On the state level, Weaver and his team helped organize a GoFundMe for all Oregon arts organizations that lost funding. “We want people to continue donating directly, but this is a way of saying, ‘We Oregonians all stand together,’” he said. The money will be split evenly among all the organizations. In many ways, the Portland Playhouse’s rallying cry has brought the city’s theater community together.
Alongside the GoFundMe, other theaters in the region have started their own individual fundraising initiatives. On May 8, Portland Center Stage, the city’s largest theater company, launched the Save PCS campaign hoping to raise $9 million in the next 14 months. The organization had already been struggling financially due to low ticket sales and the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic. When the company lost $45,000 in NEA grants, its staff decided it was time to launch the campaign.
“As the culture of this moment works to erase humanity, our theaters are absolutely essential gathering spaces for people to come together and feel seen,” Marissa Wolf, the artistic director of Portland Center Stage, said.
“It’s misery resistance, a term I’m borrowing from the DJ Lynnée Denise, which refers to the idea that it’s so freaking hard out here that we need to have spaces where we can feel seen and heard, where we can experience healing and laughter,” Wolf said.
Profile Theatre Project, another Portland institution, lost $35,000 last week when its NEA grant was cancelled, money that was going toward supporting Playwright Convening, an initiative that brings nationally known playwrights to Oregon to encourage collaborations with local artists.
“While the grant was about 4% of our operating budget,” said the theater’s director, Josh Hecht. “It was 50% of that project budget.”
Luckily, Hecht was able to rely on financial support from a small handful of significant individual donors who have been able to make up almost all of what the organization lost. “This is a real shift from public support of the arts to private individual support, which I think is not a sustainable proposition and certainly does not speak to the place arts and culture should hold in any industrial society,” he said. “The US is alone among developed countries in how little support it gives to the arts.” While his colleagues have done a great job of finding ways to survive in this fraught political climate, Hecht notes that this is not a viable long-term solution.
For now, however, leaders in the community believe it’s important that everyone continue business as usual. “Our goals are to celebrate the deep and rich culture of our neighborhood, Black culture,” Weaver said of Portland Playhouse, which is located in a historically Black neighborhood. “To celebrate the power of people coming together and building connections across differences, to provide fair wages to working artists in Portland.”
None of that is going to change. “We are going to double down,” said Weaver, who noted that whatever happens, he won’t go down without a fight. In his words, “Bring it.”
About the author(s)
Briana Miller
