Tanner Lets ‘Mom’ Go to Chicago

The comedies of Justin Tanner, long regarded as one of Hollywood’s private pleasures, are beginning to stray away from home.

For the first time in Tanner’s career, one of his plays will be presented elsewhere--and at a rather prestigious elsewhere, Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre. A new production of “Pot Mom,” one of L.A.’s longest-running plays ever, will play at Steppenwolf’s second space, the 180-seat Studio Theatre, June 28-July 26.

The shock for Tanner followers is that the playwright-director is relinquishing the directorial duties--and probably won’t even see the Chicago production until after it has opened.

Tanner has always maintained a tight, auteur-like control over his work, but he will be otherwise occupied during the next two months, opening his long-awaited “Coyote Woman” on May 29 at the Cast Theatre, which has been his creative home since 1989. Tanner said he hates to leave his plays until they’ve been open for at least six weeks, so he probably won’t get to Chicago until July.

The link between Tanner and Steppenwolf is actress Laurie Metcalf, the Steppenwolf veteran who became famous as Roseanne’s sister on TV. A year ago, she took one of the roles in “Pot Mom” during a benefit run at the Cast. Then she wanted to take Tanner’s work to Steppenwolf. Although an initial press release announced that the Chicago company would do a new Tanner play, Tanner declared that all of his plays must premiere at the Cast. However, he agreed to let Metcalf take “Pot Mom” without him.

“I’m excited, but it’s scary” to let the play go, Tanner said. He met with the Chicago director, Wilson Milam, and he was gratified to learn that they share a mutual taste for the overlapping dialogue in Howard Hawks movies such as “His Girl Friday.” That kind of chaotic, rapid-fire talk is essential to the success of his own plays, Tanner said.

Metcalf, who will resume the role of the title character’s best friend Michelle, will be the only Chicago cast member who has appeared in Tanner’s work. Her 14-year-old daughter Zoe Perry will take a teenager role that was played in the original cast by an adult, Dana Schwartz; her age may require a bit of tinkering with a few lines, Tanner said.

Because of the theater’s size and Chicago Equity rules, the play will be on an Equity contract in Chicago--another first for Tanner, who has always presented his plays under Equity’s 99-Seat Theater Plan. Equity contracts not only pay higher wages to the actors, but Tanner’s royalties will bring him more money than he can make per performance at the Cast. In case the original production’s actors, some of whom are in “Coyote Woman,” feel left out, Tanner said he won’t let “Pot Mom” move to New York without the original cast.

“Coyote Woman,” meanwhile, is about a woman who’s about to be engaged, but her life changes when she is scratched by a coyote in Griffith Park, Tanner said.

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SECOND CITY: Another play recently made the journey from an L.A. 99-seat theater to an Equity contract in Chicago: “Sweet Nothing in My Ear,” Stephen Sachs’ drama about a dispute over a deaf child. Seen at the Fountain Theatre last year, it opened at Chicago’s Victory Gardens April 4. Reviews were generally enthusiastic. Sachs is now working on a screenplay adaptation for Barbra Streisand’s production company.

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HELLMAN TIMES 2: A Noise Within’s eighth season will include its first two-part epic, Lillian Hellman’s “The Little Foxes” and its sequel, “Another Part of the Forest,” as well as the classical company’s first play from ancient Greece, “Oedipus the King,” as translated by Kenneth Cavender.

Company officials believe that their production of the Hellman duo, to be staged by artistic co-directors Julia Rodriguez Elliott and Geoff Elliott, will be only the second time the plays have been staged in tandem. The first was at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater, an alma mater for many in the A Noise Within company. The original productions of the two plays occurred seven years apart, in 1939 and 1946.

The Glendale company’s complete schedule:

Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing,” Sept. 25-Nov. 22; the Hellman plays, Oct. 9-Nov. 29; a revival of the company’s “Great Expectations,” which looks as if it’s becoming a holiday tradition, Dec. 3-20; Sophocles’ “Oedipus,” March 5-May 16; Joe Orton’s “What the Butler Saw,” March 19-May 23; and Shaw’s “Heartbreak House,” April 9-May 23, 1999.