Director Hired for Grove’s ‘King Lear’

GARDEN GROVE —  Vowing to put on at least two plays in the Festival Amphitheatre here, GroveShakespeare acting artistic director Jules Aaron has hired a well-regarded guest director to stage the opening production in June and is scrambling to keep the beleaguered company’s doors open until then.

Aaron, who took over as interim head of the county’s second-largest professional theater last week following artistic director Stuart McDowell’s sudden resignation, said Monday that Sabin Epstein will direct “King Lear” and that “a major fund drive” is being planned to mount it and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

“We’re going to put those two shows together as a package,” said Aaron, who will direct the second show. “And we’ll look at a third show separately. We need to make a commitment to a season, which means doing more than just one show.”

GroveShakespeare, which began mounting outdoor shows at the amphitheater in 1981, has customarily produced three Shakespearean plays during the summer. “Romeo and Juliet” had also been promised as a third show.

Aaron met Monday with about 25 people--among them the theater’s staff, three Grove board members and two outside management consultants--to devise a plan to salvage the season. He said $7,000 was raised “in personal commitments” at the meeting “to keep the company going” until next Tuesday, when he expects to submit a budget detailing “what it will cost to do the two shows and when we will need the money.”

Aaron estimated that “a ballpark figure” of more than $100,000 would be required to mount both productions. The Grove currently has a deficit of “around $200,000,” board president David Krebs said. Cash assets at the moment are a bond of about $8,000, he said, which has been posted with Actors’ Equity protecting two weeks’ salary and benefits for union actors in “King Lear.”

In addition, income from subscriptions is arriving by mail. The theater has about 1,500 subscribers, Krebs said. The troupe currently needs about $10,000 a week to operate, he estimated.

In the meantime, Epstein went into rehearsal Monday with Alan Mandell, who will star as Lear, and with the rest of the cast.

Epstein, who is in his 40s and grew up in Los Angeles, was a resident director at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco during the 1980s. He is also an associate artist of the Georgia Shakespeare Festival in Atlanta. Epstein returned to Los Angeles in 1991 and began directing for a new classical troupe in Glendale, A Noise Within, most recently a critically praised staging of Shaw’s “Man and Superman.”

Epstein said Tuesday he would not do “a bare-bones or blue-jeans” production of “Lear.” He noted that it “will be in a scenic environment with costumes, lighting and music.”

Epstein said he is “operating on the assumption” that the Grove would be able to raise the funds for such a production and added that he expects the experience to be “quite an adventure. In fact, it already is. It’s fly by the seat of your pants, which makes it dangerous and exciting.”