Review: ‘The Arts’ Makes a Wonky Case for the NEA

NEW YORK — Jacqueline Kennedy building a case for federal funding of the arts? Of course. Lillian Gish was an unsurprising ally, too. But Charlton Heston appearing before Congress in the 1960s to endorse the idea?

Yep. And when Heston has his cameo in “The Arts,” a wonky and extremely niche experimental docudrama at La MaMa about the history of arts funding in the United States, he makes a compellingly conservative pitch.

“Those who might have misgivings,” he tells the lawmakers, “could reassure themselves by considering even the King James Bible was produced by a royal commission and paid for by the royal treasury.”

Based partly on the congressional hearings and debates that led to the creation in 1965 of the National Endowment for the Arts, “The Arts” is studded with thought-provoking shards of dialogue like that, both pro and con — such as one legislator’s assertion that “the golden period of American literature,” the heyday of Twain and Poe, arose with zero federal support.

But this is advocacy theater by the company Sponsored by Nobody. Written and conceived by Kevin Doyle, who directs with Mike Carlsen (best known for playing Titus’ beloved Mikey Politano on “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt”), “The Arts” calls for saving what it views as an endangered NEA — a necessity, it argues, if artists and arts organizations are to survive. While it doesn’t make an entirely coherent case, it does make a poignant one, albeit in a production that bogs down in cacophony and murk just when it most needs lucidity.

Before the show begins, a solitary figure (Georgia Lee King, the cast’s comic standout) sits at one end of a long table littered with papers and coffee cups — in the Senate, evidently. “Has anyone located Sen. Pell?” she asks into a microphone. After a while, she asks again.

Claiborne Pell, the longtime senator from Rhode Island who died in 2009, wrote the legislation that created the NEA, and “The Arts” is something of a lament: Where is the American leader who can help artists now?

Aided by lots of video (designed by Wilson McGrory) and five fine actors who channel many voices, the show does a clear enough job of delineating the NEA’s creation, but it descends into chaos when it arrives at the culture wars of the 1980s and ‘90s, when the agency came under attack by Republicans and funding was gutted. If you don’t recognize the Andres Serrano photograph “Piss Christ,” projected huge upstage, “The Arts” is not going to help you out.

But Sponsored by Nobody describes itself as being “in search of a blue-collar avant-garde,” and that’s where this show is rooted: in an awareness of artists with untapped potential barely surviving financially, their creative work thwarted because they have to devote so much time to day jobs.

Toward the end, the performance suddenly clicks into focus as an urgent message from a generation of artists who have never known the stability — or the cultural validation — that a well-funded NEA gave to their elders. “The Arts” is an SOS.

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‘The Arts’

Through Sept. 30 at La MaMa, Manhattan; 212-352-3101, lamama.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes.