Encore! A New Decade for Grove’s Tiny Troupe

Are you ready for Orange County’s big cultural anniversary celebration?

No, not the county’s huge centennial celebration. This one will be smaller, its focus nowhere near 100 years.

Still, the 10th anniversary of the Grove Theatre Company in Garden Grove promises to be a very onward-and-upward affair: Plucky little troupe from a much-maligned city makes good, and all that.

“We’ve shown we’re not some flash in the pan,” said Thomas Bradac, the founding artistic director of the Grove, which again this year will offer the only Shakespeare festival in the county, along with such fare as Arthur Miller’s “The Price” and the current production, Stephen Metcalfe’s “Vikings.”

“Artistically,” Bradac continued, “in the past three years, we feel we’ve grown by leaps and bounds.”

He doesn’t dispute that the Grove’s first few years may have been a little wobbly. But now Bradac and new managing director Richard Stein say the Grove is quite healthy, thank you. Attendance is rising, critical approval is increasing, the troupe’s professional ties are expanding and the organization itself is stabilizing.

“There were a lot of doubters,” Bradac said, “that this company--and this city--could pull this off.”

Before the late 1970s, Garden Grove was considered to be on the wrong side of the county’s tracks--a community with a rootless, faceless populace, a decaying commercial core and no cultural landmark to speak of. It’s unofficial name: “Garbage Grove.”

But as early as 1974, City Hall was trying to turn that image around. With the help of federal community-development grants, whole sectors of the city were being revamped with new shopping centers and industrial parks.

As part of the beautification of the original Main Street downtown, $2 million was being pumped into the Village Green Park sector to make it a cultural showplace for visual and performing arts.

After restoring the historic Mills House into a gallery complex, the city converted the 178-seat Gem Theatre, a one-time movie house, into a permanent stage residence for the Garden Grove Assn. for the Arts, the company’s parent body.

Officially, the Grove’s 10th anniversary celebration--which will start with a production of “Richard II” in June--will commemorate the night the Gem reopened with a production of “Anything Goes.” But perhaps the more significant event came a few weeks later, when “Romeo and Juliet” was presented there.

“It was a test, a kind of Shakespeare teaser, to see if the community would take to a whole summer of the Bard,” said Bradac, a former Orange Coast College instructor whose previous stage experience ranges from work with an activist troupe in Los Angeles to a stint with a stock company in Pennsylvania.

“Romeo and Juliet” proved enough of a success that the Grove Shakespeare Festival started in 1980 at the Gem and moved next door the following year into the 550-seat Festival Amphitheatre that the city had built.

Around the same time, the Gem ran into a community controversy. Many residents, including some City Council members, complained because two plays--”One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “The Hot l Baltimore”--contained words these people considered grossly offensive.

Bradac and others pointed out that some of the same plays had been staged, unexpurgated, by South Coast Repertory, UC Irvine and Cal State Fullerton. Nevertheless, the City Council adopted a policy forbidding the use of “vulgarisms” at the Gem and began closely scrutinizing Bradac’s selection of plays.

“I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “I thought these battles (over profane words) were fought and finished with in the 1960s.”

But the trouble eventually subsided as, Bradac said, “people realized (that) the theater is a window on the world and that a certain reality (in terms of language) is pertinent. We’ve had plays since with similar words, and there have been no problems.”

Still, although the Grove continued its mix of tried-and-true light fare (“Charley’s Aunt”) and serious works (“A Man for All Seasons”), attendance fell from 70% in 1979 to below 60% in the early ‘80s. “The (language) hassle hurt us,” Bradac said, “and so did the fact our presence was no longer a novelty.”

Another reason was painfully obvious at times. “We were still struggling when it came to maintaining artistic levels,” he said. “We got good notices for some plays, but other productions, I’m afraid, were pretty terrible. We were awfully uneven.”

The turning point, Bradac said, came with the 1985-86 season. To carve out its own semi-professional niche, the Grove began using outside Equity “guest” actors and offering more high-powered drama at the Gem--”A Moon for the Misbegotten,” “The Dresser,” “Crimes of the Heart”--along with lesser-known, offbeat works, such as the frontier drama “Go See the Elephant.”

“We started out as a community theater operation, but our aim has always been to fill that huge creative gap (in the county) between South Coast Rep on top and all the usual community theaters below it,” he said.

At the Shakespeare Festival, meanwhile, the Equity guest roster was increased to seven actors. Rancho Santiago College was now co-producing the festival and was offering a festival-connected conservatory program. The results, Bradac said, have been dramatic.

--For the third straight year, the Grove Theatre Company has won recognition from the California Arts Council, the state’s official grants-giving agency. The latest grant, $5,980, is down from the previous $7,540 but higher than the first year’s $1,380.

“Artistically, they are still somewhat uneven,” Raymond Tatar, the council’s theater grants administrator, said of the Grove, “but they are a solid group, one moving up the developmental ladder and taking positive steps toward professionalization and community outreach.”

--The Grove picked up 20 awards in the Hollywood Drama-Logue critics’ best-of-1987 lists, in production, design and technical categories. The Grove’s resident professional actor-director, Daniel Bryan Cartmell, was honored three times: for directing “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” and for his performances in “Devour the Snow” and “True West.”

--Attendance is most encouraging. This fall, the capacity rate reached 80% at the Gem, thanks largely to the box office success of the recent “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” The summer’s festival reported an overall rate of 60%, the best yet. Bradac hopes to top that with the 1988 festival that opens June 24 with “Richard II,” followed by “A Comedy of Errors” July 27 and “King Lear” Aug. 26 (with Cartmell as Lear).

--Bradac said he’s negotiating with Equity to hire the first union stage manager for the Shakespeare festival and to phase in more Equity actors.

The Grove’s ascent hasn’t escaped the attention of South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, the county’s only fully professional repertory theater.

“We’re pleased with how it (Grove) has grown from a relatively small community operation to one well on the way to professional importance,” said David Emmes, SCR’s producing artistic director.

Grove backers, bolstered by the upcoming anniversary celebration, are projecting all sorts of future--and costly--possibilities. For one, they wouldn’t mind seeing the theater join SCR in the upper ranks of full professionalism.

There’s also talk of a 500-seat, $5-million third playhouse to supplement the Gem and the amphitheater, and of a touring program to schools and other community sites, and of presentations that would showcase ethnic communities, beginning this fall with the Namsadang dance troupe from South Korea.

Backed by a reorganized and enlarged board headed by Robert Dunek, a League of California Cities executive, the Grove seeks to boost its current $500,000 annual budget to $1 million in the next few years and to find more corporate underwriters.

It’s a formidable fiscal task, especially because the city’s annual subsidy has dropped to about $80,000 and because fund-raising competition among expanding arts organizations, particularly the Orange County Performing Arts Center, has increased vastly.

But managing director Stein is all optimism. “Orange County has 2 million people, and no one theater can possibly meet all the needs,” argued Stein, former director of the University of Hartford’s Lincoln Theatre in Connecticut. “In its past decade, the Grove company, as much as any organization here, has demonstrated just that.”