ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : What She Did for Love

The woman who anonymously contributed $10,000 recently to the Grove Shakespeare Festival--half the money needed to save its current season--isn’t wealthy. She just loves the theater, describing it as “you and the actors on the stage and the darkness.”

And she was furious at the Garden Grove City Council, and especially at Councilman Raymond T. Littrell, who amid debate on whether the city should help the Grove continue its season, dismissed the Bard as “not American.” He urged the troupe to concentrate on American culture.

Shaking with anger, the woman called the Grove’s artistic director, Thomas F. Bradac. She happened to have a windfall in her bank account that she had planned to put toward her mortgage. Instead, she offered it to the Grove.

The donor has said that when she hung up the phone, she experienced “an unbelievable spiritual uplift.” She realized that her gift might provide an opportunity for other theatergoers to recognize, as she did on seeing a Tom Stoppard play in London 20 years ago, that no matter how sure one is about the way things are, there’s always another way of seeing them.

Her anonymity--she’s been dubbed “the phantom lady” at the Grove--is her statement against people who give only for glory. Besides, she said, what she did is more important than who she is.

The “phantom” says she wants, should she ever win the lottery, to hire a trumpeter to attend City Council meetings to give a blast every time someone uses an expression introduced into the language by Shakespeare. Such as the naked truth, swift as a shadow, choked with ambition, something in the wind, kill with kindness, gilding the lily, cold comfort, unkindest cut of all-- and so on.

A less-known but apt phrase to describe the woman’s joy in giving what little she had: “Poor and content is rich, and rich enough.”

Her generosity should inspire Littrell to abandon his Anglophobia and the council to support the acclaimed theater.