Garden Grove Will Keep Shakespeare Festival Open--for a While

While Richard II--the character--perished in rehearsal at Garden Grove’s Festival Amphitheatre on Wednesday night, “Richard II”--the play--was granted a stopgap reprieve by a City Council bitterly divided over the Grove Shakespeare Festival.

The tragedy opens the 10th annual festival tonight, but the future of the Grove Theatre Company remains in doubt. The council members have been caught up in debate over the role that theater should play in a city they call a “hard-hat community.”

After rejecting by a 3-2 vote the company’s request for a $53,000 advance on its 1988-89 budget request Monday, the council voted 4 to 1 on Wednesday to keep the festival open--at least through July 14--by appropriating $20,000 from the current city budget of $45.2 million. The troupe operates the downtown cultural complex, including the Festival Amphitheatre, the Gem Theatre and the Mills House art gallery, on a city contract.

Councilman Milton Krieger, a Grove supporter, characterized the Wednesday meeting as “another disaster.” Krieger said the city may have “legal exposure” if it does not fund the Grove through the fall season. “I am writing a letter to the city attorney putting him on notice to answer that question. . . . We may find ourselves in litigation if we do not meet our (contractual) obligations.”

A council majority led by Raymond T. Littrell has charged that the offerings of the Grove company are too sophisticated for Garden Grove residents and too expensive for the municipal treasury. Those council members have proposed various schemes to turn the theaters over to unidentified profit-minded private operators.

Mayor J. Tilman Williams, for one, has proposed that the city lease its cultural facilities to a dinner theater. “As a businessman myself, I know there are outfits that would be more than happy to come in there and run the place,” he said. “Like they do at the (Anaheim) Grand Hotel, maybe a dinner and a show too.”

Williams and Littrell have cast the issue as one of cultural amenities versus civic necessities, insisting that the city could better use its resources to support the Police Department. “The first thing you’ve got to do is take care of the essentials,” Williams said.

But Krieger argues that council members who oppose subsidizing the Grove “are holding the theater hostage and using the police force as a battering ram. But it’s a shadow, a smoke screen. Everybody knows we have a marvelous police force. To bat it around in the press every time somebody doesn’t want to spend money is an abuse of the Police Department. It’s not proper.”

The Grove company has operated the theaters for 10 years. Eighty-five percent of its budget, currently projected at $562,000, is raised from ticket sales, corporate grants and private donations. Over the decade, the troupe has evolved from an amateur group into a professional company, one of only two, along with South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, in Orange County. Since the company began requesting city money eight years ago, the council has approved--in recent years by a narrow margin--those requests.

After the council’s Monday vote against the $53,000 advance, Grove officials asked Wednesday for $24,254, which they said would at least carry the company through July 14. The Grove’s governing board will mount a campaign to raise an additional $30,000 from public and corporate contributions to complete the festival, which is scheduled to continue through Sept. 17 with “The Comedy of Errors,” “King Lear” and a one-man staging of “Venus and Adonis.”

The next step comes Monday, when the council will vote whether to grant any additional funds to the theater company.

The Grove’s board will then meet Wednesday to consider its options, including the long-range possibility that the theater would leave Garden Grove for more hospitable environs. “It appears to the board that the city still has serious questions about philosophical issues as well as management operations of the theaters,” said Robert Dunek, president of the Garden Grove Assn. for the Arts, the theater company’s parent organization.

Artistic director Thomas F. Bradac, describing the Grove as a “middle-of-the-road” company, said he was astonished that the City Council found its offerings too sophisticated.

Ironically, the Grove was denied a $15,000 grant earlier this month from the California Arts Council, in part because the state agency felt the theater’s offerings were too conventional.

“The Grove is being pulled by the arts council to do new plays, artistic plays, but yet our roots--the City Council--is pulling for more Mickey Rooney-type stuff that the arts council does not find artistically expressive,” said Daniel Bryan Cartmell, 38, a professional Grove actor and lifelong Garden Grove resident.

Cartmell appears as John of Gaunt in “Richard II” and will play the title role of “King Lear” later in the season. He and other actors insisted that Garden Grove benefits from the presence of the Shakespeare festival.

“The festival brings money to Garden Grove,” said Greg Mortensen, 32, who plays Bolingbroke in “Richard II.” “And artistically, they are only getting the greatest playwright of Western civilization.”

And some Garden Grove residents took offense when told of the council’s majority opinion of their cultural sophistication.

“I liked ‘Macbeth,’ but ‘Romeo and Juliet’ was killer, “ said Christopher Ellsworth, 22, another Garden Grove resident and Fullerton College student.

Commenting on the council’s funding priorities, another Shakespeare aficionado, construction worker Stephen Gale, said: “Garden Grove don’t need no more cops.”

“I got a hard hat, and I like Shakespeare,” added Gale, 22. “You’re seeing it like you’re there in the 1500s. It’s history, it’s cool.”