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"What do you want it for?" asks Bongi. The power-suited woman says she wants it for dinner. "Everyone knows that men have so much respect for women who are good at lapping up shit," she explains.

Then they break into a camp parody of "Surfin' Bird" ("Turd, turd, turd is the word") and Perez goes on to make snippy comments to the power- suited woman for about an hour. It ends with a woman in a fur coat strangling her obnoxious son to death. All of this is filtered through a fuzzy, glitchy P.A. system, under the vaulted ceilings of what used to be a Methodist cathedral, near City Hall.

Scandalized yet? What if you learned the play was called "Up Your Ass," that it was written by Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Andy Warhol, and that it was being staged with several thousand of your tax dollars? Well, relax. It's not being staged with anyone's tax dollars. George Coates applied to the National Endowment for the Arts for funding of a less scandalous project, an Arthur Miller play about censorship. With help from private funders, he's mounting the two shows together, on alternating evenings, to make a point about currents of "repression" in the United States.

Coates is a heavyset old radical with flowing white hair, a scruffy beard and blue eyes set in pouchy sockets. He walks with a limp and uses Cold War language to discuss pressures on the endowment. Ever since a handful of right-wing activist groups and some Republican congressmen waged a campaign to eliminate the NEA in the early '90s, there has been a standards-of-decency clause in the endowment's charter, intended to keep the most offensive works of art off the public payroll. (Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ," a photograph of a crucifix suspended in urine, famously outraged some Christian groups.)

Coates says it'll take a "Prague Spring" to lift the decency clause, and describes the current endowment budget as equal to "about 2 inches on a Trident submarine." He's a partisan in the culture wars partly because of his hippie temperament but also because the sort of work he does -- experimental theater -- hemorrhages money and needs grant support to stay alive. "In the past," he says, "I could have gotten an NEA grant for 'Up Your Ass' -- even during the Reagan administration."

He picked Miller's play, "The Archbishop's Ceiling," for a reason. It's a Cold War-era story, set in Russia, about a group of writers who meet in a house that once belonged to an archbishop. When they learn that the florid old ceiling is probably bugged by the Kremlin, the paranoid writers change their behavior for the microphones in a way that, for Coates, expresses the effects of the NEA's decency clause. "I can't apply for 'Up Your Ass,'" he says, "but if I do it as a double-book, that is, two shows together, and one of them is a show that is censored today and another is about censorship in another culture, do they inform each other in some way? That's the examination that's going on now."

In 1996, the whole NEA budget was reduced by 40 percent, from $162 million to the current level of about $98 million. Roughly a thousand arts organizations lost their grants completely; others took substantial cuts. Congress also ordered the endowment to stop funding individual artists or organizations and start funding specific projects, so there would be no confusion about where the money was going. (Pat Buchanan fueled the "Piss Christ" controversy by holding up the picture during the 1992 presidential campaign and declaring that Bob Dole had voted for the budget that funded Serrano. Of course, Dole had never heard of Serrano. The money went in a block to a larger exhibition.) The changes were seen as a victory by the Republicans -- conservative columnist George Will called the decency clause "a sop to, and a (successful) attempt to deflect, those who wanted to abolish the NEA" -- and essentially saved the endowment's skin.

Coates calls it censorship. He thinks the NEA crossed a sacred line when it accepted a mandate on content, as opposed to simple craftsmanship. "When you go into a contract with a plumber, you've got to get plumbers that know what they're doing," he says. "But to take the contract away from them because two of the plumbers are surrealists on the side -- that's a content restriction. That's really a form of oppression leveled at a certain class."

Opponents of the NEA, of course, disagree. The American Family Association, a conservative Christian group based in Mississippi, lobbied Congress in the years before 1996 to stop funding the endowment altogether. The AFA declined to be interviewed for this article. ("What is Salon? Is it a homosexual magazine?" asked spokesman Allen Wildmon.) But the AFA does have a Web site with articles stating its position: "Contrary to the argument of some," one article reads, "AFA does not believe that the elimination of the NEA is censorship. Great art has existed for thousands of years without governments funding it. AFA believes that artists should be free to produce what they want -- but that taxpayers should not be forced to pay for it."

That reasoning is what led the Supreme Court to uphold the decency clause in 1998. Performance artist Karen Finley argued, in Finley vs. NEA, that the clause was a First Amendment violation. Federally funded artists, she asserted, have a constitutional right not to be judged on the content of their projects. Justice Antonin Scalia and the majority disagreed, ruling that the government can do as it pleases with its money.

That seems logical enough. But a larger question was never addressed by the court, since it had nothing to do with the lawsuit: Is this any way to run a national arts fund?

Next page | The lost script that almost cost Andy Warhol his life