O.C. THEATER / JAN HERMAN : Misfortune of Grove Snares Gem as Well

Michael Ambrosio has run into a snafu he never anticipated.

As artistic director of the New Mission Ensemble, a fledgling amateur troupe, he’s been making plans to stage “The Elephant Man” at the city-owned Gem Theatre in Garden Grove.

Ambrosio and his associates thought they were doing things properly.

They obtained amateur rights to the play. They arranged to rent the Gem. They went into rehearsal at the 178-seat theater. They printed up flyers announcing the premiere for July 30.

Now they’ve discovered the Gem is considered off-limits by the play’s licenser, Samuel French Inc., because the theater management still owes royalties on another play done at the Gem last fall by GroveShakespeare.

The theater management is none other than GroveShakespeare, of course, which recently went belly-up as a producer but continues as the Gem’s operator under a lease agreement with the city.

“We definitely have a problem,” Ambrosio said earlier this week. “We’re trying to find the best route to take. We’re talking to the Gem, and we’re talking to a pro bono lawyer to see if Samuel French is violating the Sherman Antitrust Act.”

Among the many ironies of the situation--not least the peculiar notion of invoking federal antitrust laws--is that GroveShakespeare has been banking on rental fees from the Gem as its major source of earned income while the board of trustees tries to figure out its cloudy future.

In financial terms, the Gem management stands to gain more than anyone from “The Elephant Man”--and with the least risk. Because Ambrosio and his associates can’t afford to pay anything up front, they agreed to give the Gem 90% of the show’s gross box-office revenue instead of a flat fee.

Tom Moon, who heads the GroveShakespeare board, told The Times two weeks ago that he expects the Gem’s share of ticket sales to come to $6,000. That amounts to more than half the anticipated rental income from the Gem through the end of December, according to a report Moon filed with the city several weeks ago.

(Given the theater’s size, only eight announced play dates for the show from July 30 to Aug. 14 and no budget for marketing or advertising, Moon’s projected income from “The Elephant Man” is hard to credit. But that is another story.)

Ambrosio says he originally planned to do the Bernard Pomerance play at a park in Anaheim. When GroveShakespeare canceled its 1993 season in June and the Gem became available, however, he decided to move the production to Garden Grove.

“We had the rights for the outside venue,” Ambrosio said, “and we told Samuel French about the change. They said, ‘That should be no problem.’ But then they checked their records and said, ‘Wait a minute. The theater owes us money.’ We explained we’re not the ones who owe the money. But they said it didn’t matter.”

Arden Heide, who handles professional licensing for Samuel French in Los Angeles, confirmed that GroveShakespeare still owes “substantial royalties” on a production of Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” which was staged at the Gem in the fall of 1992.

Repeated calls from The Times to the Gem Theatre have gone unanswered.

“We do not license into a location where outstanding royalties are due, even if it involves another producing company and even if it’s for an amateur production,” Heide said. “We generally don’t make exceptions. We would just as soon see the theater turned into a coffee shop.”

Samuel French, which controls hundreds of popular theatrical properties, is the nation’s largest play licenser. That it will not allow its properties to be mounted at the Gem until GroveShakespeare makes good on its debt is a bad signal to other potential renters.

Several major theatrical licensers--the Dramatists Play Service in New York, for example, and the Dramatic Publishing Co. in Woodstock, Ill., which is also owed royalties by GroveShakespeare--say they enforce a similar policy to Samuel French’s.

“We all basically follow the same rule,” said Sherry Rini, speaking for Dramatists Play Service in Manhattan. “It’s the theater address we hold responsible, not just the producer. That’s how the industry works.”

According to Heide, the reason is simple.

“We don’t want to put our authors in the position of being investors,” he said. “That’s what they would become if we didn’t have this policy. Producers sometimes want to pay off their old debts from previous productions with proceeds from a new one. It’s like sending your authors to Vegas.”

Consequently, until GroveShakespeare pays off its bills for outstanding royalties on several plays, Gem renters are likely to run up against the same problem as Ambrosio and his associates.

Either renters will have to do shows whose rights are in the public domain or they will have to pick properties licensed by agencies not owed money by the Gem management.

Better yet, they might consider holding Sunday services at the Gem, as one church group has already arranged for the immediate future.