Foundering Grove Cancels Its Outdoor Season : Stage: Shakespeare programs are dropped as the struggling group considers Chapter 11 to keep itself going.

“We are not the first who, with best meaning, have incurred the worst.” --Cordelia in “King Lear”

For the first time Tuesday, GroveShakespeare officials admitted without equivocation what has become obvious in the aftermath of the theater company’s apparent collapse: Its outdoor summer season has been canceled.

“We’re going to have to drop the Shakespeare,” said Tom Moon, one of only five members left on a foundering GroveShakespeare board of trustees from which four, including chairman David Krebs, resigned Monday.

“King Lear” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” had been scheduled for the 550-seat, city-owned Festival Amphitheatre. The Grove, which also has produced plays at the Gem Theatre here since 1979, has been Orange County’s second-largest professional theater company.

Moon and board member Peter Carter said they would meet with attorneys this week to consider declaring bankruptcy to stave off creditors and give the remaining board members a chance to reorganize the nonprofit company.

“I’m spearheading the theater to keep the doors from closing permanently,” Moon said. “If need be, we would go into Chapter 11. That would simply put all our creditors on notice to keep them from pressing their claims.”

Of roughly $200,000 in Grove debts, Moon estimated that “between $50,000 and $60,000 is owed to subscribers” and “the last I heard,” $78,000 is owed to Barbara Hammerman, a former board member and chief executive who resigned in December. Hammerman helped engineer the board’s ouster two years ago of the Grove’s founding artistic director, Thomas F. Bradac. From that point on, the company began to unravel.

“What the numbers tell me is we’re in very bad shape,” Carter said. “I know it sounds dumb not to be precise. But the people who were handling this are no longer with us.”

*

Krebs resigned Monday without explanation just a week after declaring at a press conference that he was “absolutely committed” to the Grove. He has not returned repeated phone calls.

Carter said Tuesday that the Grove board learned of Krebs’ action in a faxed message to board president-elect Greg Devereaux. Moon added that David Kramer, Richard Cheshire and George Hahn also resigned. Carter said that Cheshire had not been active and that Hahn is moving out of state.

*

Acting artistic director Jules Aaron also resigned late Monday in a sudden about-face. Only hours after delivering a board message that “King Lear” had been “indefinitely postponed” but “not canceled” (“To me semantic credibility is less important than leaving the door open,” he explained), Aaron declared he had lost confidence in the Grove leadership.

The “Lear” cast had been dismissed late Sunday. The Grove’s administrative staff was laid off last week, although business manager Steven Boyer continues to work without pay.

Both Moon and Carter said Tuesday they would be eager to rehire Aaron as part of a Grove reorganization. But Aaron, who has stepped in twice as interim head of the Grove, has let it be known he is not interested in becoming an administrator and wouldn’t consider taking the job of artistic director.

He has spoken privately, however, of combining forces with producer James Doolittle of Los Angeles and Scott Rogers, an artistic director who programs the Broadway Series at the La Mirada Theatre, to put commercial productions into the Festival Amphitheatre.