GroveShakespeare Doesn't Deserve Help

By MARGE SWENSON

June 28, 1993 12 AM PT

<i> Marge Swenson is a 35-year resident of Garden Grove, where she was a founding member of the Village Green Arts Alliance that helped establish GroveShakespeare 15 years ago. She signs her cartoons EGRAM, Marge spelled backward. </i>

I am deeply upset by the Garden Grove City Council’s decision to give GroveShakespeare $11,000. Giving that money to a board of trustees that has proven itself incompetent is an outrage. Shakespeare was for the people. What the council has done has nothing to do with the people. It was hoodwinked into thinking this theater can survive. The theater’s board shouldn’t even be allowed to try. Somebody else ought to get the chances it has squandered.

Tom Moon, who has been on the board all along and has taken over as its acting president, is a well-meaning man. But he can’t save the theater. He himself admitted to the council that the Grove’s 1993 season of Shakespeare is canceled. Why, then, did the council give him more money? It is peculiar and mystifying. That money is being spent unwisely.

Since I’m a cartoonist, I thought a cartoon would be the best way for me to vent my feelings and to comment on what is happening.