Impacts of tariffs, trade wars and federal funding cuts have been steadily trickling into Jefferson County, most recently for Key City Public Theatre’s world premiere of “Carmelita.”

The show ran from April 24 through May 11, with bad news that funding had been cut landing on the desk of Denise Winter, executive artistic director, on May 2. She reported what had happened to audiences at the remaining performances. Up to that point she had acknowledged the NEA’s support.

Key City Public Theatre had received a Challenge America grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for the third year, which the NEA formally announced on Jan. 14. 

“It’s a year-long process to get the grant,” Winter said. “We applied in the spring of 2024, and we received notice that we’d been elected in November, but we weren’t allowed to announce anything until they made the formal announcement.”

“It’s very hard to apply for grants from the NEA, so the Challenge America grant was created for smaller organizations to learn how to work with the NEA and apply for grants,” Winter said. “If we were successful in obtaining a third Challenge America grant, I thought we might move on to applying for other NEA grants.”

Winter estimated that the latest Challenge America grant, which was for $10,000, amounted to roughly a quarter of the budget for “Carmelita.”

Winter noted the grant for “Carmelita” was a reimbursement grant, which meant that Key City Public Theatre had to spend money on the production of the show in order to be reimbursed by the NEA.

But what Winter was forced to inform audiences of “Carmelita,” starting on May 2, was that the NEA Challenge America program had been cancelled for the fiscal year. It has left Key City Public Theatre with a shortfall of $10,000 that it was contractually obligated to spend, for which it will not be reimbursed.

“Most of the money we spent went toward artist salaries, and we only had a week left in our show’s run, so 90% of that money was already spent anyway. If we’d closed the show at that point, it would have been the worst thing we could have done, because now we really need the revenues from those remaining shows to help offset our losses.”

Winter said each administration has its own funding priorities, but this marks the first occasion she can recall in which those funding priorities were revised after such funding had already been approved.

“We were given seven calendar days to appeal this decision,” Winter said. “But when I asked how we could meet the administration’s current funding priorities, they had no templates or processes for us to do that. Grant-writing is targeted toward very specific requirements, and we didn’t receive any.”

Winter expressed concerns about other arts funding, because while the NEA doesn’t fund “a lot” of direct grants, other grants are funded by the NEA, including ArtsWA’s “Arts in Education” program of outreach to students in their classrooms.

“We were supposed to find out in May if we would again receive funding for that program,” Winter said. “That expected notification has been pushed back to June, so it’s not looking great.”

All told, Winter estimated that roughly $30,000 of Key City Public Theatre’s annual budget has come from the NEA, which amounts to between 5-10%.

“We’re not deeply dependent on it,” Winter said.

“At the same time, our budgets are tight enough that we don’t actually have much wiggle room.”

Winter emphasized that Key City Public Theatre would “continue to share the community’s stories,” illuminating its history and culture, and she lamented that the current administration doesn’t see “Carmelita” as aligning with one of the administration’s stated priorities of “celebrating” American history.

“Carmelita” playwright and director Ana Maria Campoy wrote that she sought to chronicle the unwritten histories of Mexican immigrants to the United States, such as her mother and grandmother, in part to preserve their “public acts of love and community care,” to “admit we need each other.”