Council Rejects Grove Festival Bailout : Theater: Following the City Council’s denial of emergency funds, the Garden Grove troupe has canceled its final performance of season.

The cash-starved Grove Shakespeare Festival, which has canceled the final production of its current season, is apparently a traitor to American culture because it produces the work of foreign authors.

At least that was the message Grove artistic director Thomas F. Bradac says he took away from the City Council debate Monday night, when a 3-2 majority denied the Grove emergency funds that would have enabled the troupe to close out the season in December with Dylan Thomas’ “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.”

“I think we were all surprised to hear that Councilman (Raymond T.) Littrell believes Shakespeare and the classics are un-American,” Bradac said in a midnight interview Monday, after the Grove board of directors canceled “A Child’s Christmas” but reiterated its decision to open Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” Oct. 4 as scheduled.

“What he basically said was that we should only be doing American culture,” Bradac claimed, “that we shouldn’t be doing Italian culture or the German culture, and we don’t need Shakespeare. The issue really comes back again to a majority of the council believing that Shakespeare and the classics are not something they want in their community.”

At the meeting, Littrell said that Shakespeare is not American culture, and that “we left England to get away from that.” Tuesday, though, he maintained that he had not labeled Shakespeare and the classics un-American, nor had he asserted that the Grove should promote only American culture.

“I didn’t say that. I said we have a great American culture and we really aren’t taking care of it. We are doing everybody else’s culture,” Littrell said Tuesday.

This season the Grove has produced three Shakespearean plays--”Much Ado About Nothing,” “As You Like It” and “Othello”--and “The Miser” by Voltaire. Shakespeare was English, Voltaire was French, Wilde was Irish, and Thomas was Welsh.

Littrell said Tuesday that the issues are money and whether the city should fund the theater at all, and not an “artsy thing” concerning various cultures. “There’s nothing un-American about making a business deal,” he said. “When they can’t keep it together, don’t blame (the council). They (the theater) don’t have a business plan in place to recover from their financial problems.”

Bradac pointed out, however, that a detailed business plan had been presented to the council.

The 12-year-old, nonprofit Grove troupe operates the outdoor Festival Amphitheatre and the indoor Gem Theatre, both owned by the city, under a city contract.