Garden Grove Gives Theater Center 3 Months to Improve

The Garden Grove City Council voted Tuesday night to give the Grove Theater Center three months to change some of its policies or risk losing control of the two city-owned venues it operates.

Voting 4 to 1, council members said they want the Grove to be more receptive to renting to community groups. The theaters have been used mainly for the company’s own professional productions.

The council also expects the Grove to move quickly toward full nonprofit status so it can raise money on its own to offset costs.

Kevin Cochran, the Grove’s artistic director, said, “We agree that we have been remiss” in not fully embracing community groups. He said the center will work to meet the council’s demand. After the three-month period, the council could vote to give the Grove eight months’ notice that the city is terminating its contract.

Some speakers at Tuesday’s meeting said it would be difficult for the Grove to serve two masters--professional theater and community events. Councilman Mark Leyes, who cast the dissenting vote, warned that the city risks losing professional theater entirely if it presses the Grove too hard. But the council majority, while praising the quality of productions, stressed that more community events are needed.

The center’s management of the 172-seat, indoor Gem Theater and the Festival Amphitheater, an outdoor facility that seats as many as 550, became an issue last summer when Garden Grove officials sensed they weren’t attracting people to downtown.

In September, city officials put the center on notice that it was not meeting its contractual obligation to generate a busy and varied schedule of downtown events by producing its own plays and hiring out the two theaters to community groups.

A ‘Gut Feeling’ Called for More Results

“There was a gut feeling that there wasn’t a lot going on there, and we expected more,” City Manager George Tindall said.

Charles Johanson, the Grove’s executive director, concedes there may have been flaws in the strategy that he and Cochran have followed the last seven years. When they began in 1994, Johanson said, they had to dig out from under a cloud of public skepticism about the theater because previous operators had struggled for years on the edge of financial collapse. They took over after one of their predecessors had fallen into bankruptcy.

“We made a conscious choice to focus solely on the artistic product” and earn back the theater-going public’s goodwill with quality productions, Johanson said in an interview. They decided they would focus on marketing, fund-raising and building a bigger audience after they had built a reputation for putting on good shows.

“In hindsight, that may have not been the best decision,” Johanson said.

The Grove Center has struggled along as the smallest kid on the block in Orange County professional theater circles. Its budget for 2002 is $225,000, of which the city contributes $40,000 a year, compared to more than $8 million and $4.6 million, respectively, at the much older and better-established South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa and the Laguna Playhouse in Laguna Beach.

To jump-start growth, the Grove in April proposed a marketing campaign to be funded by a city contribution of $113,600; the council Tuesday night denied that request. While building its audience base, the theater company would, for the first time, concentrate on attracting large private grants and donations--a crucial step for any nonprofit arts organization.

The Grove Center’s last play of 2001, Neil Simon’s “The Last of the Red Hot Lovers,” ran for 10 performances in October and November and drew only 501 attendees--132 of them paid. Johanson attributed the dismal returns to post-Sept. 11 shock. This season’s first play, “Sylvia,” by A.R. Gurney, has drawn 749 theater-goers, half of them paid, to eight performances; the show has been extended an additional six performances because of solid demand.