‘Heartbreak’ Women Have the Spirit

“Nothing like a bunch of women around to empower each other!” chirps Margo, one of four women sharing a beige hotel room with Native American motifs in the Joshua Tree desert. They are attending a women’s conference, which is supposed to be about learning, about love, about healing. But it’s 100 degrees outside, and the hotel room only has two beds, so pretty soon it’s about petty irritation, it’s about selfishness, and it’s about Mallomars.

“Heartbreak Help” at the Cast-at-the-Circle Theatre is Justin Tanner’s 10th play and it is his strongest and funniest piece yet. In a gleaming style all his own, which could be dubbed L.A. comic realism, Tanner takes on the harmless hypocrisies of spiritualism, 1990s-style. Though he milks the world of aromatherapy and vision quests ruthlessly and brilliantly for laughs, he eventually presents a larger and rather sage view of new-age feminist doctrine as inherently neither true nor false, no better or worse than any other set of maxims around which people build communities.

Tanner seems to have a special gift for writing women, and his four characters here are created with both compassion and acute comic scrutiny. They affect each other in the most amusing and unspiritual ways. Laurel Green, who has appeared in all of Tanner’s plays, usually playing silky-voiced, woefully transparent phonies, has her juiciest role yet, and she is hilarious in it. She plays Paula, a high-strung anal compulsive trying to find inner peace. She travels with a hypoallergenic pillow and has a meltdown if anyone touches her toothbrush. Once ruffled, which is a remarkably easy state for her to achieve, she finds insult everywhere.

She is driven nearly insane by the sloppy, anything-goes approach of Margo, a part blissfully inhabited by Ellen Ratner (the original Mom in “Pot Mom”). Margo’s needling of Paula shows her relaxed pose to be but an irritating front for naked aggression.

In comes the blowzy Andromeda (Carol Ann Susi, under-rehearsed but funny), a wounded divorcee and compulsive eater who does “fabulous healing work with the women in the Los Angeles area.” She demonstrates her technique, attempting to chant away Paula’s anxiety (or “clean her chakras”) by using bad nautical metaphors in a sing-song Brooklyn voice that is the antithesis of soothing. Andromeda has dragged along her sullen teenage daughter Sage (a terrific Pamela Segall), who always looks like she just stopped crying but who turns out to be an assertive and essential component of the group.

Not much happens as these women go out to make their way in the world of nature and of channeling seminars and of cliquey cocktail parties and then come back to the hotel room to reconnoiter. But, amid the bickering, a fragile team is created in that hotel room, where these four disparate personalities begin to forge a little shield against the outside world, as hostile at the “Woman, Writer, Hero” conference as it is back home.

Tanner offers vivid portraits of the offstage women at the conference, particularly the goddess of the women’s seminar, Bryn Masters, who walks around in “diaphanous chiffon tunics” and wears her new-age superiority as imperviously as a tyrant wears his sword.

As director, Tanner delivers the play’s heightened realism through a fast but not hurried onstage pace and by expertly orchestrating the play’s rhythms--made up of the rises and falls, the allegiances and betrayals of these women’s interactions, their anger and their affection.

As writer, Tanner has managed to do what few playwrights who grew up on a steady diet of TV sitcoms accomplish: He has shown that a comedy with a constant stream of jokes does not have to trivialize everything it touches, stoop to the obvious, become maudlin or, conversely, embrace the black absurdity of a Christopher Durang. Tanner’s unique relation to his characters, whom he views mercilessly but without judgment, sets the play apart and gives it a gravitas it wears almost invisibly.

Unlike his last play, “Intervention,” “Heartbreak Help” builds to a satisfying conclusion, one that makes sense in a world he has created with total clarity, not unlike the worlds created by Joe Orton, yet with more feeling. With “Heartbreak Help,” Tanner’s voice is clearer and stronger than ever.

* “Heartbreak Help,” Cast-at-the-Circle Theatre, 800 N. El Centro Ave., Hollywood, Friday-Saturday, 8 p.m., Sunday, 7 p.m. Ends July 7. $15. (213) 462-0265. Running time: 2 hours.