South Coast Repertory gets an assist after losing NEA funding for ‘The Staircase'
But with a little help from a philanthropic organization started by a Newport Beach family, whose founder heard about the loss and stepped up to replace the lost grant money, the show and the season went off without a hitch.
Although the National Endowment of the Arts had initially awarded the grant to SCR in November, the agency informed the Costa Mesa theater company in a May 2 email the funding had been withdrawn, due to the updating of grant-making priorities to projects that aligned with missions prioritized by the Trump administration.
A list of fundable projects, the email explained, included those that elevate historically Black colleges and universities and Hispanic-serving institutions, celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence, foster AI competency, empower houses of worship to service communities, foster skilled trade jobs and support the military and veterans, among others.
The loss in funding, far from the total cost of the project, helped support the work of several skilled technicians and was a 'meaningful amount of money,' SCR Managing Director Suzanne Appel told City News Service in May.
So when officials learned a short time later that the OneRoot Foundation, which had never before worked with South Coast Repertory, had offered to fill the budgetary gap left by the NEA's withdrawal, they were a little stunned and deeply touched.
'It was incredibly generous and life-affirming support that says something about what they stand for,' SCR Artistic Director David Ivers said of the foundation's gift Tuesday. 'We cannot say thanks enough.'
Founded in 2021 by the Pyle family of Newport Beach, the OneRoot Foundation supports a number of causes through private grantmaking and volunteerism. Trustee David A. Pyle, also founder and chief executive of American Career College, said the gift was made in honor of his father, actor Denver Pyle, who portrayed 'Uncle Jesse' Duke in the TV series 'The Dukes of Hazzard' and racked up more than 200 film and television credits throughout a 50-year career.
Robert May, the executive director overseeing OneRoot Foundation's philanthropic efforts, said the organization was proud to support SCR, where he and his family have attended annual productions of 'A Christmas Carol' for more than 25 years.
'We believe in doing what is right, so seeing the NEA pull its funding the day of the opening with no warning was disappointing, to say the least,' May said in a June 11 news release.
'We wanted to make it right and assure that South Coast Repertory had the funding required to complete 'The Staircase.' We support the vision of SCR to engage and enrich our community with outstanding programs.'
Just as OneRoot Foundation pledged its support, SCR filed an appeal to the National Endowment for the Arts to reinstate the withdrawn award. Officials maintain 'The Staircase' meets the administration's guidelines favoring projects that benefit skilled laborers and tribal communities.
Written by native Hawaiian playwright Noa Gardner, 'The Staircase' told the story of a Hawaiian family and celebrated culture through ancestral myths, legends and music, exploring the relationship between Hawaii and the mainland U.S. Its cast and crew featured three native Hawaiian actors and music director and dramatist Mehanaoakala Hind.
'It's astonishing to me we're presenting the world premiere of a play that takes place in one of our 50 states, from a community that's been largely ignored as it relates to three-dimensional art on the stage,' Ivers said of the funding withdrawal decision. 'That's as un-American as you can get.'
South Coast Repertory as of Tuesday had not yet learned whether a decision had been made on the theater company's appeal to the NEA.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
New York Post
15 minutes ago
- New York Post
New Yorker writer who referred to Sydney Sweeney as ‘Aryan princess' deletes series of racist X posts: ‘I hate white men'
A staffer for the New Yorker who denounced Sydney Sweeney as an 'Aryan princess' has spouted anti-white and antisemitic rhetoric in social media posts — before scrubbing her account after being called out on Friday. Doreen St. Felix, 33, had written several racist posts on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, including that 'whiteness fills me with a lot of hate' and that 'the holocaust is the worst thing to happen to black people.' The unearthed inflammatory tweets date back to 2014 — three years before the Haitian-American journalist was hired by the left-leaning magazine run by longtime editor David Remnick. Advertisement 6 Doreen St. Felix, 33, deleted her social media on Friday after inflammatory posts were unearthed. X/dstfelix St. Felix deleted her X account after her past comments resurfaced following her recent article for the Conde Nast-owned publication in which she criticized Sweeney's American Eagle campaign. In the 1,040-word piece that ran Aug. 2, she accused Sweeney's fans of wanting to 'recruit her as a kind of Aryan princess' and declared there were 'plenty of reasons' to dislike the ad. The ad has been panned by the 'woke' mob for its play on words that boasts about the blonde star's 'great jeans.' Advertisement However, it was St. Felix who was feeling the heat after X users — including conservative journalist Chris Rufo — flooded The New Yorker's site with screenshots of her past tweets. In one tweet targeting white men dated in December 2014, St. Felix wrote: 'You all are the worst. Go nurse your f–king Oedipal complexes and leave the earth to the browns and the women.' The resurfaced messages revealed a pattern of racially charged commentary spanning multiple years. Advertisement 6 St. Felix penned a provocative article for the New Yorkers in which she made reference to Sydney Sweeney as an 'Aryan princess.' American Eagle In one post, St. Felix admitted she 'writes like no white is watching.' Another declared that she 'would be heartbroken if I had kids with a white guy.' Her antipathy extended to broader cultural claims, including assertions that white people's poor hygiene 'literally started the bubonic plague, lice, syphilis.' Advertisement Keep up with today's most important news Stay up on the very latest with Evening Update. Thanks for signing up! Enter your email address Please provide a valid email address. By clicking above you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Never miss a story. Check out more newsletters She also suggested that 'we lived in perfect harmony w/ the earth pre whiteness' and blamed environmental destruction specifically on 'white capitalism.' Her posts also contained provocative references to the Nazi slaughter of six million Jews. In one tweet, she described what she called 'the holocaust gesture,' writing that 'it's tricknological, when white people invoke the holocaust' because it 'allows them to step out of their whiteness and slip on fake oppression.' 6 Sweeney is starring in an ad campaign for American Eagle Outfitters. American Eagle She also wrote that 'the holocaust birthed trauma studies' and claimed it 'explains a lot about why we get so many things wrong about how trauma comes.' In another post, she claimed 'the tolerability of racism is linked to how its acted out on brown bodies. The holocaust was not tolerable bc of white victims so it ended.' 6 St. Felix scrubbed her social media on Friday. X/realchrisrufo Advertisement St. Felix could not be reached for comment after deleting her social media presence. The Post has sought comment from both Conde Nast and The New Yorker. Many of her posts were written in late 2014 against the backdrop of racial tensions that were stoked by the police-involved deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner on Staten Island — both of whom were black. None of the officers involved were indicted. 6 The now-deleted posts appear to make light of the Holocaust. X/realchrisrufo Advertisement A Dec. 5, 2014, tweet referenced The Post. She wrote: 'there's a slow, second holocaust against brown people in this country and the nypost 'Supports the NYPD' so they are terrorists as well.' Social media users noted the apparent contradiction between St. Felix's past statements denouncing capitalism and her living conditions. Her listed address corresponds to a $1.3 million home in a gated Brooklyn community overlooking a marina. 6 She deleted posts declaring 'I hate white men' and calling for whiteness to be 'abolished.' Getty Images for The New Yorker Advertisement St. Felix, who has also penned articles for Vogue and Time magazine, regularly contributes to The New Yorker's Critics Notebook column. Prior to her current role, she served as editor-at-large for Lenny Letter, a newsletter created by actress Lena Dunham, and worked as a culture writer for MTV News. Forbes named her to their '30 Under 30' media list in 2016. The following year, she earned finalist status for a National Magazine Award in Columns and Commentary, ultimately winning in the same category two years later in 2019.
Atlantic
an hour ago
- Atlantic
Is Anyone Actually Mad About Sorority-Rush Dances?
'You know the LIBS are seething over this,' Joe Kinsey, an editor at the sports website OutKick, wrote on X while reposting a video of sorority girls doing a choreographed dance. Many of the girls were wearing red-white-and-blue outfits, though some were dressed as hot dogs. They waved American flags in front of a banner that read We Want You Kappa Delta. 'Credit to these ladies for pumping out patriotism to kick off the 2025 school year,' Kinsley wrote. It wasn't only the display of patriotism that supposedly made liberals seethe. 'The purple hair lesbians have to be furious that SEC sororities ARE BACK,' Kinsey wrote while reposting another sorority-dance video. This one had no clear Americana element aside from the matching trucker hats all of the dancing girls were wearing. Kinsey's two posts were viewed nearly 40 million times. Many other such videos have been shared on X in the past couple of weeks, as sororities have begun recruiting for the new school year. The videos come from TikTok, where sorority dance videos have long been popular. But they've been presented on X with a new gloss: Democrats, liberals, and leftists are enraged by pretty, mostly white young women who are dancing happily. It drives them up the wall when a woman is blond! Do not let a liberal see a woman smiling while wearing a short denim skirt. The only thing that is missing is evidence of seething libs. Search around social media, and you might be surprised how difficult such reactions are to find. In fact, I couldn't find a single one. When I asked Kinsey where he got the idea that people were angry about the sorority-recruitment videos, he didn't point me to any specific examples. He noted that many people replied to his posts saying that they weren't mad about the TikTok dances. But, he said, 'I don't believe that.' By now, this is all familiar. Recall the recent controversy over an American Eagle ad starring Sydney Sweeney, in which the actress hawked denim jeans by making a pun about her genes. A small number of people on social media did get very angry, and posted about how the ad sounded like a eugenics dogwhistle. Their reaction was then amplified by right-wing commentators eager to make the point that the left hates hot women. The fact that the situation involved Sydney Sweeney, a celebrity who had already been evoked in culture-war debates in the past, drove even more attention. It turned into a full-blown news cycle. (I am confident my grandmother heard about this.) In both cases, this burst of bizarre posting is less a story about American politics than it is a story about social media and, specifically, X. Whatever else you may say about Elon Musk's platform, it is the best place to watch a fake drama unfold. Both of the videos that Joe Kinsey shared—of the girls with the flags and the girls with the trucker hats—were originally posted on their respective sororities' TikTok accounts. But the versions he shared had been uploaded to X by what appears to be an account called 'Calico Cut Pants,' which seemingly exists to move short-form videos from one platform to another. The account follows no one and is named after a sketch from the Tim Robinson Netflix show I Think You Should Leave. Other sorority dance videos have been pulled from TikTok and posted by an account called 'Big Chungus,' which also posts almost nothing but videos from other sites, paired with incendiary rhetoric. Accounts like these can bring in money by driving engagement on X, thanks to a revenue-sharing program that debuted after Musk took over the site. Both Big Chungus and Calico Cut Pants have Premium badges, which means they can get paid for generating activity including likes and replies. According to X's Creator Revenue Sharing guidelines, the company maintains some discretion in calculating the true 'impact' of posts. For instance, engagement from other paid accounts is worth more than engagement from an unpaid account. It stands to reason that the best way to make money is to elicit some reaction to your content from the people who enjoy X enough to pay for it. Social media is replete with political outrage, and playing to either a liberal or conservative audience is likely to draw attention. (Certainly, plenty of accounts decrying MAGA values, real and exaggerated, exist.) But X, in particular, is a much more right-coded platform than it was a few years ago, and it makes sense to pander to the home crowd. Consider 'non aesthetic things,' an account that has 4.9 million followers on X, all from posting short-form videos—sometimes relatable, sometimes nostalgic, generally just mind-numbing. Its bio links to an Instagram page that is full of ads for the gambling company Stake. (None of these accounts responded to requests for an interview.) The non aesthetic things account shared a video of sorority girls at Arizona State University who were performing in jean shorts, most of them quite short, and cowboy boots. The X caption makes reference to 'their JEANS'—a subtle nod to the Sydney Sweeney panic. This pairing of footage and wink was a solid bet to produce a big reaction. Given all the attention the Sweeney dustup received, returning to it is logical for engagement farmers. 'BREAKING,' wrote a pro-Trump account called 'Patriot Oasis' that almost exclusively posts short-form videos, 'Sorority at the University of Oklahoma wearing 'Good Genes' is going VIRAL showcasing pure American beauty. Liberals are OUTRAGED online.' The caption suggested that the sorority is participating in some kind of activist response to the villainization of Sydney Sweeney, though there is no reason to believe that. The girls in the video never say anything about politics, Sydney Sweeney, genes, or even jeans. The sorority has been making similar dance videos for years. Nevertheless, the right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk reposted Patriot Oasis to his 5.1 million followers and asked, 'Do you see the difference between conservative and liberal women?' Underneath his post, a Community Note generated by other users pointed out that the video doesn't reveal whether the women are conservative or not. But that hardly mattered. Many others made the same argument in the replies to Kirk's post, driving up engagement. Although the original post has since been deleted, Kirk's repost has more than 3.8 million views. Sorority dances worked well on social media even before they were inserted into a fake culture-war debate, because they are briefly hypnotic due to the weirdness of so many people moving in the same way while wearing such similar outfits. They offer the muted thrill of a flash mob. But plucked from their original context, they offer more. Someone finds them and puts them on X with just a phrase or two of framing and they blow up. People watch the videos of young women dancing and gleefully share them, writing, for example, 'nothing is more triggering to leftists,' and 'at what point do you just give up if you're a lib?' and 'America is BACK and Democrats hate it.' There is no need to point to an actual instance of a leftist or lib or Democrat being triggered. It is easy enough to imagine how triggered they are.
Chicago Tribune
an hour ago
- Chicago Tribune
Plans for new La Fiesta de Elgin parade canceled by lack of entries
Plans for a La Fiesta de Elgin parade have been scrapped because too few people signed up to participate, but that won't stop them from trying again next year, organizers said. This year, they will return to the traditional caravan of cars, an event that has been held in past Elgin celebrations of Mexican Independence Day. La Fiesta de Elgin also will offer the traditional elements of live music, food vendors, a market and fireworks when it's held Saturday, Sept. 13. Making the jump from a caravan to parade proved more difficult than anticipated, according to Elgin City Councilman Anthony Ortiz. Friends of Masons organized the first caravan five years ago and approached the city last year about replacing it with a downtown parade, similar to the one held for the Fourth of July but as a gathering that would put the spotlight on Hispanic culture, Ortiz said. While a committee started putting plans together for the event in January, it became clear in the last few weeks that they would not have enough entries to pull it off, he said. 'It's our first year doing it. People just didn't know about it,' Oritz said. 'We have to go back to the drawing board and educate the community, tell them we are doing a parade and get them to sign up.' Ortiz said he hopes the event will make its debut next year and become another part of the day-long celebration, but until then the caravan will remain one of the main La Fiesta activities organized by the city in partnership with Centro de Informacion, Epic Real Estate Group, Elgin State Bank and Friends of Masons, he said. And attendees this year can look forward to an expanded La Fiesta de Elgin Mercado, which will be open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Riverside Drive. The street market will have Hispanic-owned businesses, live music, a car show and family-friendly activities, organizers said. Hours for the free evening festival will be 5 to 11 p.m. at downtown Festival Park, where a large replica of Mexico City's Angel of Independence will be on display and family activities, like a piñata smash, will be held. Bands slated to perform this year are Los Yaguarú, Estilo Al Norte, Sonora Dinamita and Banda Los Sebastianes. DJ Eddy P will serve as MC and be spinning tunes between sets. The celebration also will include El Grito, the traditional call for Mexico's independence, and will end with fireworks. As for the caravan, it is set to start at 9 a.m. at the intersection of Slade and Douglas avenues and end on Highland Avenue. Additional festival details can be found at
