L ast year I went to Washington with Melanie Griffith, Joanne Woodward, and Walter Moseley to lobby for the National Endowment for the Arts. The Speaker of the House had not met with NEA chairman Jane Alexander in the entire time she had been there, and he decided to have breakfast with us largely because of Melanie. He told Melanie he had written a novel which had two parts for her in the movie version: the sultry nanny or the dutiful wife. Finally they told me to speak. I mentioned how my NEA grant enabled me to write The Heidi Chronicles; how the play was presented at Playwrights Horizons, a not-for-profit theater; and how the play then toured the country for two years, keeping theaters and restaurants afloat across the country. At the end of my speech he says to me,  “Arthur Murray didn’t need a grant to write a play.” And I came close to saying, “Newt, put a little fun in your life—try dancing. It’s Arthur Miller,” but I didn’t because I was too concerned with getting grants to authors. As we left he apologized to me. “I made a mistake,” he said, “I meant Arthur Miller.” And I said, “Yes, and he did have a grant—it was the WPA.”

We spent the day in Congress advocating the importance of the arts in America. We were told never to talk about the soul of a nation. Never to mention that we were in a society that is in search of redefining itself. We were told never to mention that the violence they seem to object to so much in film and television is seldom present in theater. We were told never to mention that theater and theater writing is where ideas come from. Basically, we were told to present theater as education. Theater as important not for itself but because it can fit into another agenda, like community service. A representative from Pennsylvania, a good guy, said, “Look, my daughter is in plays but I don’t think the government should support them. I like them but health and education and the budget are more important.”

Okay, I’m going to say something rather Marie Antoinettish. Let them eat plays. There is a case to be made, an important case to be made, for art for art’s sake. There is a case to be made that the quality of life of a culture comes from its artists. We will be remembered not for a balanced budget, but for what we contribute to society.

These are hard times. Virginia Louloudes, the executive director of the Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York, says she constantly hears a refrain of “There are too many not-for-profit theaters in New York.” It’s very hard not to feel dispirited. It’s very hard with cutbacks not to feel that our theaters, our work, is not as important as it should be

But I also know that nothing creates vital theatrical energy like anger. What we have is enormous energy and what we know how to do is put on shows. Here in New York, we changed the face of Forty-Second Street. I remember when my play Uncommon Women and Others was first read at Playwrights Horizons in 1976, a massage parlor was next door and upstairs there were remnants of the Sex Institute for Technology. Andre Bishop came out with a bag at the end of the reading and asked for donations and my father gave him fifty dollars. The theaters we started on Forty-Second Street changed the face of the city. Now the same people who are cutting our funding can ballyhoo that Disney is moving in. But I know who started it all, and so do all of you.

I have always had a Melitta drip theory of culture. I believe real ideas start with individual artists. That’s why on the not-for-profit stages in New York we first saw plays by women and about women and plays that honestly addressed gay life and the tragedy of AIDS. We saw plays that took the initiative with nontraditional casting, and the diversity of the city was finally reflected on stage. It was only after the non-profit theaters took the initiative that these topics dripped their way into the popular culture. I am a writer who has always benefitted from the not-for-profit theater. I grew up in New York and saw free Shakespeare in Central Park. My first play was done at Playwrights Horizons in 1973 when it was at the Y on Fifty-Third Street. My colleagues Christopher Durang, Eduardo Machado, Charles Fuller, Tina Howe, Craig Lucas, Michael Weller and I all came of age in not-for-profit theaters nurturing new plays. We are still lucky enough to work with these theaters. Last year Carole Rothman and the Second Stage did a revival of my play Uncommon Women and Others, and they also produced a new play by Lynn Nottage, a young African American writer.

More than at any time, we need to stick together now. We need to take enormous pride in what we have accomplished and, frankly, secure a theater for the next generation of writers. Most importantly, we can’t wait for someone else to do it for us. We need to take the matters in our own hands, like we did on Forty-Second Street. We get so bogged down in the difficulties of it all—funding, casting, reviews or lack of reviews, land-lords—that we lose sight of the joy of theater and the reason why we did it to begin with. We need to think as creatively about our survival as we do about our plays.

Finally, we need to reconnect to the work itself. Andre Bishop now runs Lincoln Center Theater, and on days when it all seems impossible, he goes to see the play in his theater. That’s the bottom line; that’s where we begin. As my father used to say in the ribbon business, we’ve got quality goods. It’s time to stop apologizing for them and pretending they are less important than we believe them to be. We deserve the arrogance of our achievements. Because not-for-profit is not only where the theater in this country is born, it’s where artists have a continuous home. It’s time for us to set the agenda.