Hard Hats May Well Come to the Bard’s Rescue

My wife and I rediscovered William Shakespeare in an unlikely place this summer. At least Garden Grove seemed to me an unlikely setting to feed cultural appetites. It seems even more unlikely today after the City Council withdrew the support money for its splendid Shakespeare theater company and thus forced it to close down after its upcoming run of “The Importance of Being Earnest,” which begins Oct. 4.

I feel a considerable sense of personal loss, like a new friend who suddenly moves away just when the promise of intimacy becomes very real. The arts have been so badly battered in this country over the past year--artists must feel like punch-drunk fighters, flailing out in every direction when they should be concentrating on their craft--that it is hard anymore to feel anger. The action in Garden Grove just saddened and depressed me.

We spent three warm, delicious nights last summer watching Shakespeare under the stars in Garden Grove. We watched “As You Like It” and “Much Ado About Nothing” and an evening of readings from the Bard which--unlike the purists--we found delightful. We were looking forward to expanding this feast next summer.

I wasn’t present Monday night when the Garden Grove City Council denied the Grove Shakespeare Festival emergency funds that would have carried it through the rest of the season.

But from accounts in The Times and conversations with people who were there, it would appear that a majority of the council believed that the company should do “American” plays and regards Shakespeare as a foreign intrusion that speaks an unwelcome cultural language. Apparently the same feeling applies to the Festival’s production of Dylan Thomas’ “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” which has become a staple for children in the community and will be washed out by the council’s action.

Satirizing this kind of provincial, jingo reasoning would be easy. Like shooting fish in a barrel. But at least one member of the festival family chose to address this attitude directly and seriously in the council meeting--and I asked him later to enlarge on those remarks for me.

David Herman--who directed “Othello” at the festival this summer--has impressive credentials for speaking out. He is English, once lived in Stratford-on-Avon where Shakespeare was born, served an apprenticeship as an actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and has been connected with the theater all of his working life.

He told me that he arrived at the council meeting late, “when the debate was coming to a head, and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The sense of it was that the work being produced by the festival theater was not American, and we needed to get some American culture in here instead of all this Shakespeare stuff. I had a strong feeling that money was not the problem, that the council majority was a lot more concerned with the nature of what they were supporting than with fiscal policy.

“They were stepping on this theater as if it were a bug to be annihilated. There seemed little concern with the impact on the community of rejecting this small amount of aid. They apparently felt that this theater provided no real connection with the people of the community, and we were simply an elitist group pushing our own agenda. I felt that someone should address this feeling simply and directly.”

So Herman did. He told the council that when he first came to Los Angeles five years ago, he knew nothing about Garden Grove or the Shakespeare Festival. “But when I was introduced to it, I was struck with a splendid contribution it made to an area with a multiethnic base. Building a theater season in such an area around the plays of Shakespeare seemed to me both visionary and enlightened.

“Why? Because of the enormous impact Shakespeare has made on every country and in every language of the world. Shakespeare truly speaks a universal language, and this is the only Orange County theater that offers his voice regularly and highly professionally. I couldn’t imagine a better community for this to take place.”

His words didn’t change any votes, but probably nothing would have at that point--not even pointing out the supreme irony of rejecting Shakespeare as elitist in what one councilman described as a “hard-hat community.”

Shakespeare wrote for the hard hats of his day. They were the people who flocked to his plays--and still do in other countries of the world.

But the dedicated people who kept the festival afloat most of this year through increasingly hard times are not yet ready to throw it in--even under the possible threat of cancellation of the festival’s lease on the city-owned theater.

With their major sources of public revenue denied them, they can look only to private support. “And,” as one of their officials told me wryly, “we don’t attract the heavy hitters. We don’t offer the glitz and panache of South Coast Repertory or the Performing Arts Center.”

So they’re going after the lighter hitters--you and me--with two fund-raisers in October they hope will begin to underwrite a new season next year, and perhaps even save their Christmas show.

There will be a walkathon--called, naturally, “Walk for William”--that will start at 8 a.m. on Saturday, Oct. 13; it will cost $20, and each participant will be given a T-shirt to commemorate the event. The walkathon will be followed at noon by an auction of the company’s costumes and props. They will be “cleaning out Shakespeare’s closet” in a kind of medieval garage sale.

The second event will be a Monte Carlo night on Oct. 26 at the Garden Grove Community Center; the cost, $15 or two for $25. All of the money thus raised will go directly to support the Grove Shakespeare Festival.

All this agony over a few thousand dollars--a pittance in a county as wealthy as this one--seems to point up two fundamental problems: There are certain types of cultural events--opera, ballet, classic theater--which will always hold little interest for the majority but which are absolutely essential in the lifeblood of a healthy society. In a system like ours where politicians are so directly accountable to the majority, we need means--either through sizable private or routinely budgeted public funds--to sustain and nourish the arts.

And second, what is happening to the Grove Festival is not just of concern to the citizens of Garden Grove. This is the second largest theater--and the only one with a regular menu of classics--in Orange County, and those of us who want to see it back for another season need to demonstrate that in tangible ways. Like money.

Of course if some of those billionaire South County developers decided that this might be a good place to put a few thousand, it would be gratefully received. They wouldn’t even have to take part in the walkathon. And neither do you and I.