Garden Grove City Delays $33,000 Request From Shakespeare Group

The 10th annual Grove Shakespeare Festival remained in danger of closing after the Garden Grove City Council postponed action Tuesday night on the Grove Theatre Company’s request for an additional $33,000 to complete its summer run.

City officials said the council would reconsider the company’s request at an as-yet unscheduled meeting during the week of July 11. Tuesday’s postponement was the second in two days.

Last week, the council granted the festival $20,000 of the staff-recommended $83,000 subsidy to the company. The theater said that amount would keep the festival--currently featuring “Richard II”--open through July 14.

The Grove had requested a minimum of another $33,000 get through the summer. The festival is now soliciting donations from individuals and corporations to complete its season, scheduled to run through September with “The Comedy of Errors,” “King Lear” and “Venus and Adonis.”

Thomas F. Bradac, the Grove’s producing artistic director, said more than $7,000 has been raised in private donations since the council denied the subsidy advance on June 20.

The council has been bitterly divided over the future of publicly supported theater in the city of 135,000. Two members, Raymond T. Littrell and Robert F. Dinsen, assert that Shakespeare’s plays and other Grove offerings are too sophisticated and expensive and that their “hard-hat” constituents would be better served by dinner-theater productions. Two others, Milton Krieger and Walter E. Donovan, argue that the festival brings attention and class to culture-starved Garden Grove.

Mayor J. Tilman Williams, up for reelection in November, is the swing vote and has yet to take a firm position on the Grove. Williams has proposed, among other suggestions, placing the future of the festival before the city’s voters in the November election.