‘Still Life’ Is Anything But Calm

Playwright Justin Tanner likes ‘em quick. Directing his own material, he’s the starting pistol as well as the speed-crazy crowd in a relay race run by his actors.

In interviews, the Los Angeles writer-director has referred to such inspirations as the great, manic 1940 Howard Hawks comedy “His Girl Friday,” which managed to get through a gender-bent variation on the Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur play “The Front Page” in about a minute and a half. You could hear echoes of that aural buzz in Tanner’s “Zombie Attack!” In that highly diverting Tanner romp, in which “The Big Chill” was eaten alive by “Night of the Living Dead,” the playwright’s maniacal yet deadpan style became part of the joke. It was as if the actors were asking for it, begging for something to derail their chatter, even if it took a flesh-eater or two to do it.

There’s a limitation to this approach, though, at least when applied to Tanner’s short and sour “Still Life With Vacuum Salesman.”

The current two-week revival of the 1989 play is a benefit for the Cast Theatre, bringing back to the fold Laurie Metcalf (best known for “Roseanne”), who starred in the Chicago Steppenwolf Theatre production of Tanner’s “Pot Mom,” and Tanner veteran French Stewart (“3rd Rock From the Sun”). Though Stewart can’t fully suggest his character’s lunkhead jockdom, he and Metcalf know how to spit out the dialogue the Tanner way. Jon Amirkhan’s hapless schmo of a salesman does too. The acting’s strong. The material’s paper-thin and finally not all that funny. The whiz-bang rhythms here appear to be compensating for a lack of something else.

Metcalf and Stewart play Barbie and Ken, a golden Salinas high school couple fallen into utter disrepair 15 years later. Ken, a sometime mechanic, isn’t employed at the moment; Barbie works the midnight-to-10 a.m. shift at a doughnut shop and sucks down so much coffee, she’s getting 15 minutes of sleep a night, or day, tops. (She’s haunted by bad dreams so she’ll do anything to avoid them.) In set designer Andy Daley’s hands, their house is a tiny, amusingly trashed nightmare.

Barbie has phoned Sears to get a free home vacuum cleaner demonstration. The salesman arrives and is promptly and unsuccessfully seduced by Barbie, wrestled to the floor by ex-wrestler Ken and generally made a punching bag. The play treats these never-really-got-out-of-high-school losers as the losers they are. It’s all casual insults and humiliation.

Tanner stages “Still Life” as if he couldn’t get a hard-bop Charlie Parker solo (“Bird’s Nest” or “Kim,” say) out of his head. It’s an unusually unegotistical directing style. No one lingers on anything for more than a nanosecond. The play’s over before it starts, yet Tanner’s gifts aren’t much in evidence here. He doesn’t write straight to the gag, in that hackneyed second-shelf sitcom fashion, and in this town, that counts for a lot. But between this play and the one other Tanner play (“Zombie Attack!”) I’ve seen on its feet, there’s no doubt which one works better, on every level.

All the same it’s fun to see Metcalf, Stewart and Amirkhan have at it. With Metcalf especially, you’re watching someone use everything she has at her disposal--whiplash timing, a way of using a persistent, nervous smile to signal a whole range of disappointments--but sparingly.

Anyone who had the pleasure of seeing Metcalf in the Steppenwolf productions of “Balm in Gilead” or “And a Nightingale Sang” will be pleased to note she’s as good as ever. You’d never know it by way of ABC’s “The Norm Show”: Metcalf’s best-friend character is so miserably undefined and flat-out boring, she’s fallen back as a performer on the understandable habit of working too hard. Not so here.

The play doesn’t work too hard, either. But it’s a minor work by someone who has since proven he’s capable of better.

*

* “Still Life With Vacuum Salesman,” Cast Theatre, 800 N. El Centro Ave., Hollywood. Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 7 p.m. Ends Sunday. $35. (323) 462-0265. Running time: 1 hour, 10 minutes.

Laurie Metcalf: Barbie

French Stewart: Ken

Jon Amirkhan: Vacuum Salesman