Grove Sets Plan to Rescue Season : Theater: ‘Romeo & Juliet’ canceled; still-optimistic officials call for $80,000 in donations this month to guarantee ‘King Lear’ and ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream.’

GARDEN GROVE — Faced with the impending collapse of their theater company, beleaguered GroveShakespeare officials outlined a plan Monday to rescue the current season and held to a conviction--based on little more than hope--that the classical troupe would survive in the long term.

The emergency plan cancels one of Grove’s three previously announced Shakespeare productions (“Romeo and Juliet”) and calls for charitable contributions of $80,000 over the next 3 1/2 weeks to guarantee the staging of the two others (“King Lear” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”).

“Either we raise this money by the end of the month or we can’t go on with the season,” Jules Aaron, the Grove’s acting artistic director and the chief architect of the plan, said during an interview before a press conference.

If the funds can be obtained, Aaron said, scaled-down outdoor productions of both “Lear” and “Dream” would be mounted in the 550-seat Festival Amphitheatre and a commercial non-Shakespearean show--possibly a Broadway-style musical--would replace “Romeo and Juliet.”

“Our catch phrase for this plan is ‘Skinny Shakes,’ ” said Aaron, trying to sound upbeat. “In other words, we’ll do moderately produced Shakespeare--not lavish but solid. The third show, which I’m in the process of negotiating, would be something popular, and it would have a name star.”

Aaron, who stepped in as interim head of the theater after artistic director Stuart McDowell’s abrupt resignation on May 20, was vague about the precise nature of the third outdoor show. Though “it could be a musical,” he said, “it might also be a comedy or a drama. We’re trying to find the right match between a show and a star, and we’re looking for something that will go well in the county.”

Aaron was equally vague about precisely where he expects the Grove to get $80,000, except to say that he would appeal to the public for donations through a direct mail campaign and through radio and television announcements. He insisted that the money would have to come from “new funding” and could not include box office revenues from “King Lear,” which is scheduled to begin previews on June 23, a week before his fund-raising deadline of July 1.

“I’m going to be very strict about that,” he asserted.

McDowell, who had headed the theater for 14 months, blamed his resignation chiefly on a lack of funds to get the outdoor season up and running.

All Aaron would say further about the specifics of the theater’s search for the money is: “We’re talking with several sources.” He declined to identify them. But he conceded that there are no large gifts in the immediate offing.

Of the $80,000 needed to guarantee at least a two-play season, Aaron is counting $12,000 already raised by a volunteer group in small donations at the recent Strawberry Festival and another $5,500 promised by the city’s Cultural Arts Commission.

Aaron said $52,500 must be raised by “Lear’s” first preview or the show would not go up. Even if it does open, if the next $10,000 is not found by the end of that week, Aaron said, “Lear” would be closed down.

“The theater is really at a crossroads in our 15-year history,” said David Krebs, president of the all-white, all-male Grove board of trustees. He added that even if the current season had to be canceled, “it is absolutely our commitment to continue GroveShakespeare.”

But neither Krebs nor three other members of the board present at the press conference--David Kramer, George Hahn and Tom Moon--offered any evidence of that commitment beyond wanting to enlarge the board from its current eight active members to 20, presumably with women and minority members representative of the community.

Based on its track record, moreover, the current board has proved inept in overseeing the nonprofit theater’s financial needs. And its poor performance, particularly in recent years, would seem to dim the prospects for the institution’s survival.

The Grove, for example, has not raised anything near $80,000 in outright grants either from public or private donors over the past 18 months, let alone during a single month. Historically, too, the county’s second-largest professional theater has long had difficulty obtaining large donations and making ends meet.

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Except for a $250,000 windfall from the Leo Freedman Foundation in 1991, which came to roughly a third of the Grove’s annual budget at the time, the theater’s biggest private contribution was a $50,000 grant given by the James Irvine Foundation in 1989.

Before that, the theater received an annual cash subsidy in public funds from the city of Garden Grove. The subsidy declined from about $121,000 in 1981 to $53,000 in 1988, when it was eliminated by the City Council after bitter political wrangling. Earlier this year, the city’s Redevelopment Agency provided $31,500 in federal funds to help pay for such items as the printing and mailing of a season brochure.

Meanwhile, the cash-poor Grove is not only minimally staffed--there are five full-timers and two part-timers--but is carrying a current deficit of at least $200,000, according to Krebs. And with “Lear” now in rehearsals, it is costing roughly $10,000 a week to operate.

Indeed, the contributions needed to guarantee the season must come in on a week-to-week basis before July 1 just to keep the staff and the actors on the payroll, Aaron said, a precarious situation he had vowed to avoid when he took over the job.

Aaron emphasized that the emergency plan to rescue the 1993 season--which does not address the issue of retiring the deficit--has a second phase contingent upon the effectiveness of the first. It calls for financing both a fall musical and a winter drama at the 178-seat indoor Gem Theatre with $100,000 in combined box-office revenues from the third outdoor show and a one-night “Save the Grove Benefit” to be held in the amphitheater in July.

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Aaron, who devised the plan with Los Angeles theater-management consultants Simon Levy and Larry Fisher, estimates the total budget for completing the season at roughly $280,000. McDowell’s initial budget, though never solidified, had called for more than $900,000 in expenditures.

Apart from the initial $80,000 in contributed start-up money, the rest of Aaron’s revised budget is expected to come primarily from single ticket sales. The third outdoor show, for example, would be financed largely from box-office revenues earned by the first two.

In past seasons, the Grove’s more successful Shakespeare productions at the amphitheater have brought in box-office revenues of $55,000 on average. The more profitable of two previous save-the-Grove benefits netted perhaps $15,000 at most.

Taking those figures as benchmarks for a best-case scenario, “Lear,” “Midsummer Night’s Dream” and the benefit together would earn about $125,000--which would leave $75,000 to meet the latest budget projection.

For the third non-Shakespeare show to do such huge business in the amphitheater, however, it would not only have to exceed the average attendance of previous years--customarily between 31% and 45% of capacity--but set an unlikely box-office record.

“We’re designing the show to get at least 65% attendance,” Aaron said. “It has to do that to get us through the rest of the season.”

If the Grove manages to survive until then, he said, “Suds,” a nostalgic ‘60s rock musical, will run at the Gem in the fall instead of this summer as had been promised.

As for the winter production, which would open in late November, the title has yet to be decided. “It could be anything from ‘The Glass Menagerie’ to several other options,” Aaron noted. But “Menagerie” is the likely choice. It previously had been announced for September.

In addition to “Private Lives,” which opened the season at the Gem in April, the three amphitheater offerings and the two at the Gem would fulfill the Grove’s commitment to put on six shows for season subscribers. The theater company has 1,432 season ticket-holders, according to business manager Steven Boyer.

GROVESHAKESPEARE

The Revised Season:

*June 26--July 24: “King Lear” in the Festival Amphitheatre.

*July 12: “Save the Grove Benefit,” scenes and songs, in the amphitheater.

*July 30-Sept. 4: “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in the amphitheater.

*Sept. 11-Oct. 16: A non-Shakespearean show, to be named, in the amphitheater.

*Oct. 2-16: “Suds” at the Gem Theatre.

*Nov. 26-Dec. 31: “The Glass Menagerie,” or another play if rights are not available, at the Gem.

Information: (714) 636-7213.