Shakespeare Needs Help

If William Shakespeare was alive today and wanted to produce plays in the theaters owned by the city of Garden Grove, we doubt that the City Council majority would welcome the bard to the community--unless, of course, he agreed to write only light musicals, the kind its blue-collar residents would understand. And to make the offerings more palatable, he ought to serve mashed potatoes and roast beef along with the show.

At least that is what Mayor J. Tilman Williams and Councilmen Raymond T. Littrell and Robert F. Dinsen seem to think as evidenced in their votes of nonsupport for the Grove Theatre Company and its 10th annual Grove Shakespeare Festival that opened Friday night. The company may have to abort its production schedule that is set to run through Sept. 17 because the city is withholding the annual subsidy it has been supplying the past eight years.

On Monday the council, in a 3-2 vote, rejected the company’s request for a $53,000 advance on its 1988-89 budget funds despite strong urgings for support from Councilman Milton Krieger. The council relented somewhat Wednesday when it authorized $20,000 to keep the festival open through July 14. It is scheduled to vote again Monday on whether to grant the company additional funds.

Williams, Littrell and Dinsen think Shakespeare and the cultural tastes of Garden Grove residents are worlds apart. Littrell said, “This community is a hard-hat community, and very few hard hats take in Shakespeare.” Mayor Williams wants to see the two city-owned theaters that are operated under contract by the Grove company leased to a dinner theater that could provide “maybe a dinner and a show too.” Dinsen said he surveyed residents several years ago and that the majority of them are “not too strong in the arts.”

Cultural development is a vital ingredient in the quality of community life, and the spending of public funds to support cultural facilities in concert with private efforts has historic precedence. Past national surveys have shown that most residents hold cultural facilities in such high esteem that they are willing to pay additional taxes to maintain and operate them.

We suspect that Garden Grove residents would be no different, but whatever the extent they might be willing to fund culture in their community, we doubt that most city residents are as unsophisticated and artless as the council majority portrays them to be.

Residents can prove that by responding to the Grove company’s effort to raise the needed $30,000 to complete the Shakespeare Festival from private and corporate donors.

Most people realize that they cannot fulfill all their cultural needs and desires by watching television and listening to music at home. They enjoy the arts and attending live performances of all kinds, including dinner theaters and Shakespeare. And they realize how much culture enriches community life. It is unfortunate that the council, with its lowbrow image of its residents, doesn’t realize that too.