Low-Budget and Loving It

Today, the stage at Hollywood’s Cast Theatre looks like a landfill, with what appears to be the year’s trash quota for Greater Los Angeles strewn across the floor. Crumpled paper, foam coffee cups, old high school trophies. An extra-large plastic soda bottle, not quite empty, serves as the leg for a coffee table.

During a rehearsal-break conversation here, playwright Justin Tanner plucks from the heap an ancient Barbie doll in a strapless red bathing suit, and nervously rearranges her absurdly shapely limbs.

There’s no place like home.

Of course, the Cast doesn’t always look like this. This is the set for Tanner’s “Still Life With Vacuum Salesman,” opening today for six performances. It was first presented here in 1989, the year the theater became home to the prolific Tanner’s quirky plays.

And sitting happily with writer-director Tanner amid the trash heap are actors French Stewart (“3rd Rock From the Sun”), Laurie Metcalf (“Roseanne”) and Jon Amirkhan (whose career includes a variety of stage work and movie roles). The trio, which has become part of the loyal cadre of performers who, despite success elsewhere, just can’t resist coming back to the tiny, low-budget Cast, located in a modest Hollywood neighborhood.

Amirkhan, in fact, was the first vacuum salesman when the play became the first in Tanner’s long association with the theater. And Amirkhan played the role again in 1994 during “The Collected Plays,” a Tanner marathon that also included “Bitter Women,” “The Tent Show,” “Party Mix,” “Pot Mom,” “Zombie Attack!” and “Happytime Xmas.” “Vacuum Salesman” represents the revenge of a nerd, in which Tanner--who was always picked on by the in-crowd while growing up in Salinas--fantasizes the fate of the most popular couple in high school (French and Metcalf) now reduced to a life of misery, sloth and jobs from hell, on the night of their 15th high school reunion. It was originally titled “Barbie and Ken at Home” until Mattel objected.

“I went back to Salinas, and the homecoming king was working at the 7-Eleven--it was so satisfying,” Tanner reminisces.

“This is the third couple that I’m trying to sell a vacuum cleaner to,” notes Amirkhan. “It’s like . . . ‘Love Letters!’ ” He and the rest of the cast crack up at the comparison of Tanner’s bizarre story to A.R. Gurney’s popular two-character love story, which revolved various pairs of mainly TV stars through the roles in its years at the Pasadena Playhouse and the Canon Theater.

Amirkhan and Stewart have appeared in various Tanner plays since the beginning; Metcalf came on board in 1998, helping to take Tanner’s “Pot Mom” to Chicago’s Steppenwolf Studio Theatre, the first Tanner play to be performed outside Los Angeles, with Metcalf in the title role. It garnered what appear to be mixed reviews--though Tanner thought they were just awful and says he was devastated. Though the play is ultimately anti-drug, he guesses the Midwest disapproved of any show that makes smoking pot look like fun.

No matter what Chicago thinks, all three actors say that what keeps them coming back to the Cast is Tanner’s plays--simple. They agree the playwright’s distinctive language patterns are best handled by actors so familiar with his work.

“The first time you look at one of Justin’s scripts, it might as well be from Mars,” Stewart says. “He comes from a music background; you have primary dialogue, and then you have background dialogue, and it’s all orchestrated. It’s painstaking. It sounds like it’s not, but it is.”

Welcome Change From TV Series Acting

Stewart says the Tanner family provides a welcome respite from TV. “With a television series, you are involved in a semi-political world,” he says. “You are dealing with censors who say you can say this once, you can say that twice. There’s a lot of money involved in it, so that skews what you do. Here, there’s no money involved.” Indeed, the actors are paid only $5 per performance.

Stewart believes that Tanner’s work--the early plays set in his hometown of Salinas, the later ones moving behind the closed doors of the apartments of dysfunctional L.A. singles, appeal because “there is a stinky familiarity to it.”

“I’ve known people who come to see the plays and say, ‘God, that’s my apartment,’ or ‘That’s my sister,’ in a way you don’t see that much in movies or TV,” Stewart says. “I look at these people and say, ‘That’s my friends,’ or ‘Those were my friends.’ ”

Metcalf agrees. “It’s dialogue that flows real easily out of the actors,” she says. “And when it’s done word-perfect, like [Tanner] would prefer, you would swear it was improvised. It’s also people that you don’t normally see explored; it’s types of people that some people would rather shut up in a closet and not let out.” Tanner acknowledges that, as his work becomes better-known, the pressure is on for his plays to have a life outside the Cast--and Los Angeles--but after his Chicago experience, he believes his characters are not quite ready to leave home alone. For now, if his plays are produced elsewhere, he wants to direct them.

While most anything Tanner says comes with layers of self-deprecating disclaimers, he did admit: “If you have never seen a Beckett play, or a Mamet play, you might be completely bewildered,” he says. “I think my stuff is just as distinct, in its own way.

“I want it to be just as centered in the theatergoer’s mind what one of my plays should be before they walk into the theater in Des Moines, or wherever. It’ll happen one day, but I’m not fighting it anymore.”

The 34-year-old playwright believes his work can’t feed forever on “those mid-20s, ageless people going nowhere without lives.” And, he says, “I think the next step is married people, that’s untapped territory for me.”

Still, some things die hard: “I haven’t done plays about drugs for a while,” he says. “It’s hard to let go of those easy things.”

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* “Still Life With Vacuum Salesman,” Cast Theatre, 804 N. El Centro Ave., Hollywood. Fridays and Saturdays 8 p.m. Sundays 7 p.m. Ends May 23. $35. (323) 462-0265.