Mayor Urges Election on Festival Support : Garden Grove Council to Consider Funding Request at Hearing Tonight

The future of the Grove Shakespeare Festival would go before Garden Grove voters in a proposal advanced Monday night by Mayor J. Tilman Williams.

At a turbulent City Council meeting, two factions debated the future of the festival and traded epithets before a crowd of more than 100 residents, which was overwhelmingly in favor of supporting the festival.

However, the council postponed consideration of Williams’ proposal to put the matter before the city’s voters, while reaffirming its decision of last week to advance the festival $20,000 for the first play of the current season, “Richard II.”

More Money Sought

Officials of the Grove Theatre Company, which produces the annual festival and operates the city’s cultural arts complex, said the amount would permit them to continue through July 14, but that the future of the remaining summer schedule was in doubt.

Councilman Milton Krieger unsuccessfully sought an additional $33,000 in city funds to tide the festival over for this season and supported putting the issue before voters in November.

The drama over the Shakespearean festival’s future will play again tonight, when the council considers the full funding request at a hearing on the city’s $45-million budget.

The council is split, with two members strongly favoring continued financial support of the festival and two bitterly opposed. Williams, who is up for reelection in November, has been the swing vote and sat out the debate between the festival’s main city council supporter, Krieger, and Councilman Raymond T. Littrell, who opposes continued city funding for the festival, preferring to spend the money on police improvements.

The council had been expected to appoint a blue ribbon committee to study the future of the Shakespeare festival, being put on for the 10th year by the Grove Theatre Company.

“You guys don’t have enough guts to make up your minds,” said Councilman Walter E. Donovan, who also is a supporter of the Shakespeare festival. “A city does not live by police alone, a city does not live by paramedics along, a city does not live by this council alone.”

Littrell, who has called Shakespeare’s works too sophisticated for Garden Grove residents, replied: “You guys don’t have enough guts to decide about police protection.”

The Grove Theatre Company’s present predicament unfolded on June 20, when the council, for the first time in a decade, rejected a Grove funding request. The company had asked for a $53,000 advance on its proposed budget allocation of $83,000 in the 1988-89 budget. The city’s support has made up about 15% of the company’s budget, with the rest coming from ticket sales, corporate grants and other donations.

The council subsequently granted the company $20,000, which theater officials said would keep the festival open through July 14.

A council majority led by Littrell complained that the Grove’s offerings, including the annual Shakespeare festival, were too sophisticated for the residents of what he called a “a hard hat community.”

The swing vote on the five-member council was Williams, who previously had supported the Grove. In his written introduction to the Grove festival program, Williams had said it was “a pleasure to note the tremendous professional growth of the Grove Theatre Company. . . . As a progressive community, we are proud of our cultural events.”

However, Williams later told The Times that he was distressed at the Grove’s growth into a professional company from its origins as an amateur troupe and proposed leasing the city’s cultural facilities to a profit-making concern such as a dinner theater.

William’s dinner theater proposal prompted opposition in some quarters.

“I ask that you spare me a season of bland food, average acting and another revival of ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’ ” said Sylvia Borovay, 33, a 10-year resident of Garden Grove.

But 18-year city resident Art Davis said continued city support of the festival is “just wasting money.”