Twin Cities theaters confront shrinking support from federal and private sources
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The Playwrights’ Center in St. Paul is scrambling to replace lost funding, as federal arts support shifts and other revenue sources become less reliable.
The Playwrights’ Center in St. Paul posted a call to action in late February. It said it lost a promised $8,000 grant from the Kennedy Center after the Trump Administration closed the Kennedy Center.
The organization also cited other financial pressures, saying that funding sources it once saw as reliable have been “destroyed.”
“We’ve lost long-term stability we worked so hard to establish, and we need time to rebuild it,” the post said.
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The organization also lost a $35,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts last fiscal year.
NEA terminates grants for many Minnesota arts organizations“For years, Playwrights’ Center has been a recipient of that funding,” said Nicole A. Watson, the center’s producing artistic director.
In 2025, the Trump Administration issued new guidelines on how NEA funding could be used. Grants could not be used to promote diversity, equity, inclusion or “gender ideology.”
Because the Playwrights’ Center allows playwrights to develop new work freely, it could not use the funding.
“We could not, in good faith, accept NEA funding without compromising the mission of this organization as well as the artists we were supporting,” Watson said.
Strain on theater funding
The funding squeeze is affecting theaters across the Twin Cities and the nation.
An American Theatre Magazine article in the fall of 2025 reports that, in addition to federal funding cuts for the performing arts, corporate and foundational giving are both down. In Minneapolis, the Guthrie Theater has run deficits in recent years.
The Jungle Theater in Minneapolis canceled the rest of its current season as it reassesses its long-term financial stability.
“There's a few times throughout the year where our cash flow dips really, really low,” Rachel Murch-D’Olimpio, the Jungle’s managing director, said.
“In previous years, we'd had other levers we could pull to get through the cash flow crunch, and we've, at this point, exhausted all of those,” Murch-D’Olimpio said.
That leaves organizations increasingly dependent on individual donors. The Jungle’s main strategy was to ask for individual donations, as the Playwrights’ Center has also done. As other funding sources shrink, Murch-D’Olimpio has questioned how sustainable that is long term.
“If we want to see the Jungle exist in some form for many, many years to come, we need to figure out an alternative to going back to these same people every year,” D’Olimpio said, “and hoping that they have the funds and the generosity to help us.”
The Jungle paused its programming to develop a new funding strategy outside the traditional nonprofit model of private and government support.
The Playwrights’ Center is also examining its future. An issue with a Small Business Administration loan led the Playwrights’ Center to lose more than $500,000 on the sale of a property.
“We're going to make decisions so we can continue to do what we're doing,” Watson said. “I hope that the amount of people we can continue to support stays at the number I would like it to stay at. I would love to support more people. I also know that you have to make decisions with the resources you have.”
