Final Curtain This May Be for O.C. Theater Company : Drama: GroveShakespeare leadership quits and disbands cast of ‘King Lear,’ set to open next week.

GroveShakespeare, Orange County’s second-largest professional theater company, has come apart at its tattered seams.

Both the acting artistic director and the president of the board of trustees resigned Monday after disbanding the cast of “King Lear,” which was to have opened June 26. The administrative staff was laid off last week.

Only one of the nine board members could be found for comment.

Meanwhile, the company is carrying a deficit of roughly $200,000, its highest ever. And subscription revenues from 1,432 season ticket holders already have been spent. The subscribers paid to see six shows, have seen only one, and aren’t likely at this point to see any more.

“I have resigned, and I don’t know who is running the theater,” acting artistic director Jules Aaron said Monday, only hours after claiming that “King Lear,” was “indefinitely postponed,” but “not canceled.”

“It’s a very sad situation,” Alan Mandell, who was to star as Lear, said by telephone from his home in Los Angeles.

The theater has been in and out of serious financial trouble since the late 1980s yet always managed to escape disaster. Its troubles in terms of both finances and company loyalty have worsened considerably, however, since the forced resignation of its founding artistic director, Thomas F. Bradac, in 1991 and the voluntary departure of managing director Richard Stein in 1990.

Cancellation of the Grove’s 1993 season would make this the first summer without outdoor Shakespeare in this city in a dozen years. The classical troupe, founded in 1979, has staged the Bard’s plays in the city-owned, 550-seat Festival Amphitheatre since 1981, producing more than half of his 38 Elizabethan comedies and tragedies. It also has staged scores of contemporary plays and musicals in the 178-seat Gem Theatre over the years.

Board President David Krebs, who did not return repeated phone calls, resigned for personal reasons “not necessarily having to do with the theater,” according to board member Jerry Margolin.

Margolin, who said he had spoken with Krebs Monday, was not clear on Krebs’ reasons. “I don’t have a real tight feel for what’s going on,” Margolin said. “I couldn’t get into his head.”

Aaron told The Times that he resigned “because I have very little confidence in the board.” He said “several board members are resigning,” but that could not be confirmed. Phone calls to six members of the board either went unanswered or were not returned.

Earlier in the day, speaking for the board, Aaron said, “Nobody wants to say everything is over because it’s very hard to pull the plug on a theater a lot of people believe in.”

But he added that “‘we had been hoping money would come in from donors on Monday morning, and it absolutely has not happened.”

Asked if the Grove has any future at all, Margolin said, “I don’t know what direction we want to go. Should we offer it to another professional group, or what? I think we did everything we could to keep it going. Maybe we should have pulled the plug a long time ago. But I’m not sure.”

Many observers, former company actors and former staffers have cast doubt on the board’s competence ever since it forced Bradac’s resignation two years ago this month.

Although the company already had a long history of financial troubles, company members said Bradac had provided a cohesive vision of the Grove’s identity that made for a creative environment and a sense of loyalty, which have been lacking since then.

Bradac declined Monday to criticize Aaron or the board. “I’m just sorry that the artists and the staff who tried to make it work won’t be able to do Shakespeare this summer,” he said.

But Daniel Bryan Cartmell, a veteran Grove actor who defected to Shakespeare Orange County, which Bradac assembled in 1991 after his ouster, was not so reticent.

“The board is totally incompetent--we knew that all along,” Cartmell said. “That board backed the wrong horse, several wrong horses, in fact.”

Barbara Hammerman, who as a member of the board helped engineer Bradac’s departure and then assumed leadership of the theater herself, did not last three years as its chief executive. With no previous experience running a theater company, she took over the Grove’s financial management, its day-to-day operations and its fund-raising campaign, and then resigned in a surprise move last December.

Except for a $250,000 windfall from the Leo Freedman Foundation--which astonished her as much as it did the arts community--Hammerman raised only $9,866 in corporate grants in 1991, according to tax papers filed by the Garden Grove Assn. for the Arts, the theater’s nominal nonprofit parent company.

According to the papers, obtained by The Times from the attorney general of California, the theater’s total revenue came to $881,474 in 1991, the latest year for which the state has documentation.

Hammerman was instrumental in hiring Bradac’s successor as artistic director, W. Stuart McDowell, who came to the Grove from New York in April, 1992. His abrupt resignation on May 20 began the apparent final unraveling of the company. It was during his 13-month tenure that he, Hammerman and the board ran up the Grove’s current debt, by far the largest in its history.

Ironically, Hammerman is probably the Grove’s single largest creditor. Just before she resigned, she took a second mortgage on her house and extended the theater company an $80,000 line of credit.

The disintegration of the theater also can be traced to the so-called “council wars” of the late 1980s when the theater encountered political opposition and lost a cash subsidy from the city. The subsidy had declined from about $121,000 in 1981 to $53,000 in 1988, when it was eliminated.

By 1989, Rancho Santiago College phased out its grants of goods and services to the theater because of its own budget problems. Those grants, beginning in 1982, had ranged from $105,000 to $155,000.

Dede Ginter, a friend of Hammerman who worked for three seasons as the Grove’s publicist, blamed the Grove’s crackup Monday on “a combination of no leadership and poor management. They didn’t have infrastructure to support the talent. I’m just devastated by what has happened.”

While Grove board member Margolin clung to the hope that “it ain’t over till it’s over,” Garden Grove’s deputy city manager Mike Fenderson had doubts and said both the City Council and the staff already are wondering about “the impact on the city of the Grove’s going out of business.”

The city had begun to support the Grove again with small arts grants over the last few years. As recently as April, it provided $34,450 for marketing and advertising.

“Assuming they do go out of business and we take over the facilities,” Fenderson said, “we have to look at the option of getting someone else to run them or renting them out to independent producers.”

Fenderson noted, moreover, that the city staff already fears possible lawsuits by Grove creditors trying to get their money back. “We don’t think we’re liable, but when people sue, they name everybody in sight.”

He said the City Council would take up “the matter of potential litigation” in closed session tonight.

Times correspondent Mark Chalon Smith contributed to this story.

Trouble at the Grove

GroveShakespeare started life modestly under another name in 1979 before growing into Orange County’s second-biggest professional theater company. Now on the brink of extinction, the company has been plagued by continuing financial and personnel woes.

1979: The Grove Theatre Co. is born in July with a production of “Anything Goes” at the Gem Theatre. “Romeo and Juliet,” the first Shakespeare production, is staged in August.

1980: As the Grove Shakespeare Festival, the company expands to a summer-long format.

1987: The outdoor season increases from two to three Shakespeare plays.

1988: The Garden Grove City Council grants only part of the festival’s annual subsidy request in a dispute over its “direction.” City votes to phase out its financial support.

1990: A request to the city for emergency funds is denied. Season is nearly canceled.

March, 1990: Richard Stein resigns as managing director to take over Laguna Playhouse and is replaced by Barbara Hammerman, later named chief executive.

June, 1991: Grove founder and artistic director Thomas F. Bradac resigns, confirming later that he was forced out.

July, 1991: Jules Aaron, a director from Los Angeles, steps in as acting artistic director.

December, 1991: Festival receives $250,000 from the Leo Freedman Foundation, the theater’s biggest gift ever.

April, 1992: W. Stuart MacDowell becomes new artistic director.

December, 1992: Hammerman resigns. The renamed GroveShakespeare gets no money from Freedman Foundation.

March, 1993: Laguna Beach company obtains rights to “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” an annual tradition at GroveShakespeare and its biggest moneymaker.

May, 1993: MacDowell quits amid signs the announced summer season is threatened by a huge cash crisis. Aaron steps back in.

June 7, 1993: Company announces that it needs $80,000 to guarantee “King Lear” and “Midsummer Night’s Dream”; “Romeo and Juliet” is canceled.

June 10, 1993: Theater staff is laid off.

June 14, 1993: Aaron resigns. Board chairman David Krebs resigns. “King Lear” is postponed indefinitely.

Source: Times reports

Researched by RICK VANDERKNYFF / For The Times