GroveShakespeare Survival Down to Final Hours

Say good night, Jules.

That is the message GroveShakespeare’s acting artistic director Jules Aaron has gotten so far to an appeal for funds to keep the county’s second-largest professional theater company from closing.

But even while setting today as his latest deadline “for whether to cancel the season,” Aaron remained hopeful Sunday that several personal backers from Los Angeles will deposit enough money this morning in the Grove’s depleted bank account to keep the company alive for another week.

It’s $10,000 or bust by noon.

“There are several donors who are taking the weekend to make up their minds,” Aaron said, after The Times reported Saturday that the Grove had dismissed its entire administrative staff and had collapsed in all but name.

The nonprofit Grove’s Board of Trustees announced last week that $80,000 had to be raised by July 1 to guarantee a two-play summer season of “King Lear” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

Aaron declined to name his potential contributors, but said, “I’ve had meetings with them, and these people can afford it. For them it’s just a question of whether they should put money into this theater at this time. They want to know if it’s throwing good money after bad. I’ve tried to explain that it isn’t.”

Ever the optimist, Aaron said all the beleaguered Grove needs is for “two or three people to put up $5,000 each.” That would allow “King Lear” rehearsals to continue this week until other promised funds kick in. The Shakespeare production is tentatively set to begin previews June 23 in the 550-seat Festival Amphitheatre.

Aaron termed the abrupt dismissal of staff employees last week “a stop-gap measure” that enabled the cash-starved Grove to pay the salaries of union actors in the “Lear” cast. If that payroll had gone unmet, rehearsals would have had to be suspended, in accordance with the theater company’s union contract with Actors’ Equity.

The Grove administrative staff--down to five employees before the layoff Thursday--did not have such protection. The dismissal came with about four days’ worth of salary still owed to staffers, Aaron said.

Today’s $10,000 deadline is necessitated by the start of another rehearsal week Tuesday. If the union actors can’t be paid, they must be given notice and provided with two weeks’ salary from an $8,000 bond already posted with the union by the Grove.

Over the weekend, laid-off staffers volunteered to keep the 178-seat Gem Theater open, allowing Ron Campbell’s one-man show, “Monsieur Shaherazad,” to complete its run Sunday.

“If the worst-case scenario happens, and we decide to close,” Aaron said, “I’ve promised the staff that any money coming in over the weekend will go to them and to the non-Equity actors in ‘Lear.’ ”

Meanwhile, callers to the Gem box office Sunday were treated to the tape-recorded voice of former artistic director Stuart McDowell, announcing the play schedule.

It was McDowell’s surprise resignation May 20, after a disappointing 13-month tenure, that both signaled and helped precipitate the Grove’s current crisis.

And if that were not surreal enough, a worker began installing a new facing on the marquee of the city-owned Gem, even as the Grove struggled to eke out a week-by-week survival.