THEATER : Grove Looks for Yuletide Rebirth : A strong turnout for ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’ would put the beleaguered Shakespeare troupe back in the black.

Christmas in suburban Southern California tends to have the flavor of a Woody Allen joke. As he reminded us in “Annie Hall,” elaborate home displays of Santa’s reindeer prancing under a blazing sun across a green tundra of manicured lawns somehow miss the point.

For the real thing, you have to go indoors to the theater. There is where you find people in mufflers throwing snowballs. At the Gem Theatre, for instance, the Grove Shakespeare Festival is staging just such a winter wonderland: its fifth annual production of Dylan Thomas’ ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” which opens Friday and runs through Dec. 30.

“One Christmas was so much like another,” Thomas wrote, “I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was 12 or . . . 12 days and 12 nights when I was 6.”

Even if there isn’t much high drama in the Grove’s yuletide offering--the big event is when mother burns the turkey--there is the magic of various Welsh rituals cherished by young and old. And there is, above all, the compelling language of an incomparable lyric poet.

Where Dylan Thomas grew up, “all the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged, fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find.”

In they go, “into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea,” and out come drowsy uncles and bustling aunts; red-nosed postmen with blue knuckles; the useful and the useless gifts, the latter much preferred; snowball fights and ghost stories; and the sound of church bells from the “bat-black, snow-white belfries” bringing tidings from bishops and storks over “the frozen foam of the powder and ice-cream hills.”

Little wonder that Grove artistic director Thomas F. Bradac, who is directing the production for the second consecutive year, especially prizes the language of the piece. “Highly poetic language is obviously something we concentrate on with Shakespeare during the rest of our season,” he said in a recent interview. “So this fits us well, and our audience is used to it.”

Bradac said he first came across the Jeremy Brooks-Adrian Mitchell stage adaptation of “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” in the early 1980s at the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival in Ohio. At that time, the Grove had already produced Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” for a couple of years as its annual holiday show.

“The second time we did Dickens, it was awful,” Bradac recalled. “It is possibly the worst thing we’ve ever done. That’s why I junked it. Besides, we couldn’t reproduce what South Coast Repertory does. They’ve cornered the market for ‘A Christmas Carol.’ There’s no sense in competing with them. We really needed a show that nobody else in the county was doing.”

Bradac readily volunteers that, for all the virtues of “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” there are “limited artistic rewards” in staging the same show year after year. But he is also quick to note that “there are more than enough reasons to do it,” not only because it has been a consistent moneymaker but because “it’s a chance for us to give something back to the community.”

Repaying the community has a particular significance this season, considering that charitable donations rescued the Grove from what Bradac termed “the worst financial crisis we’ve ever had since I’ve been here, bar none.”

You may remember that the 12-year-old nonprofit theater company, faced with insufficient cash to meet its payroll and its bills, told the City Council in September it would be forced to close unless it obtained about $50,000 until new revenues could be generated in October from “The Importance of Being Earnest” and from the upcoming “A Child’s Christmas.”

When a hostile council majority balked at a request for $32,157, then offered only $7,248 to keep the Grove alive for just one week, theater officials announced that they would do whatever they could to mount “Earnest” but would have to cancel the Christmas show.

The Grove finally was saved by hundreds of small contributors responding to curtain pleas during its production of “Othello” and by a $10,000 gift from an anonymous theatergoer as well as significant donations from city firefighters, a local hotel and, most recently, the Garden Grove Strawberry Festival. (See story in box on F3.)

Ironically, “The Importance of Being Earnest” turned out to be a box-office smash. It grossed $38,000 in single-ticket sales, twice what was projected. Thus, if “A Christmas Carol” does as well as hoped, the Grove could retire the $42,000 deficit carried over from last season, which got the theater into the cash crisis in the first place.

Retiring the deficit and starting the next season without red ink would be no small achievement. It also could set the stage for more amicable relations with the City Council just as crucial negotiations get under way between the city and the Grove regarding their association in the future.

The Grove’s five-year lease of the Gem Theatre and the Festival Amphitheatre, both city-owned, comes to an end in June. A new agreement must be reached in the next few months, Bradac said, or the theater company can’t begin selling tickets for next season. “Before we can even announce what shows we’ll be doing, we have to know where we’ll be,” he added.

Happily for the Grove, one of the company’s most implacable foes on the council, Raymond T. Littrell, did not run for reelection. His place has been taken by Mark Leyes, who is believed to be friendlier to the Grove than Littrell.

If Leyes forms an alliance on arts issues with Mayor W.E. (Walt) Donovan and Councilman Frank Kessler, both of whom are also supportive of the arts, that would leave the Grove’s other two foes, Councilmen Robert F. Dinsen and J. Tilman Williams, in the minority.

Such a prospect represents one of the few rays of hope amid increasingly difficult economic times not only for the Grove but for other badly neglected arts groups.