Refreshed, Ready to Go

When “The Collected Plays of Justin Tanner” opened in 1994 at the Cast Theatre in Hollywood, it should have been a heady time for Tanner.

Though he was only 30, he was clearly the L.A. playwright of the moment. Seven of his earlier, widely acclaimed and long-running comedies were being revived, and the Tannerfest culminated with the premiere of his new play, “The Tent Show.”

But Tanner didn’t have much time to bask in the glory. He was the director of all eight productions. And for several years he had been performing many other tasks at the small and low-budget Cast, from answering the phone to doing spreadsheets.

“It was fun to be a part of that Mickey and Judy scene, but it was debilitating too,” Tanner recalled during a recent chat in the Mount Washington-area home he shares with rock musician Kristian Hoffman.

Now, as “Big Bear”--a rewrite of “The Tent Show”--opens at Third Stage in Burbank, Tanner is no longer in the same limelight. But, he says, he is much happier.

On the day that “The Tent Show” opened seven years ago, Tanner was still handing his actors new pages of the script. Not surprisingly, opening night was rough. For example, Mark Ruffalo, the movie actor who was playing one of four L.A. office mates who go camping at Big Bear, called another character by his own character’s name, Tanner said.

“The play was a mess, and I hated it. For a while I couldn’t even read the second act,” Tanner said. “I felt swamped. I had no breathing room.”

By the end of the decade, Tanner had plenty of breathing room. The company at the Cast had fallen apart--the result of burnout, financial burdens and acrimony--first between Tanner and Cast producer Diana Gibson, from whom he wanted more independence, and then between Tanner and his frequent collaborator, co-producer and set designer Andy Daley.

Tanner and Daley are again in touch, but Tanner hasn’t seen Gibson since the rift. However, he still praises Gibson’s dramaturgical skill. And Gibson told The Times that “ ‘The Tent Show’ was always a good show, and I bet [‘Big Bear’] is even better. I hope he has a great success.”

Tanner’s comeback is the result of an offer by James Henriksen, who played one of the parts in “The Tent Show” after it opened and who now operates Third Stage.

In contrast with “The Tent Show,” “Big Bear” has been developed with more time for reflection and rehearsal. Tanner is grateful that he is no longer the director or the telephone operator, but he has added a new responsibility. He’s now onstage as an actor, playing a key role--Billy, a lowly mail-room clerk who accompanies the office’s more ambitious players to the woods. Although Tanner has filled in for absent actors in many of his productions, this will be his debut as an original cast member of one of his plays.

“Billy has 700 lines,” Tanner said. “My voice is raw. I went to school [Los Angeles City College] as an actor, so I had the background. I just hadn’t been called on to take it seriously.”

Not that he has forgotten that he is primarily a playwright. In fact, that’s what he has enjoyed so much about his post-Cast life--”Nothing is stopping me from writing whatever I want.”

This is due not only to his departure from his previous workload at the Cast, but also because he has been subsisting on money he earned as a movie and TV writer--assignments he acquired in large part because of attention he garnered at the Cast. However, hardly anything actually emerged on a screen as a result of those jobs, and he describes his Hollywood experiences in terms that make studio life sound similar to the backstabbing, macho mores of the employees of the title insurance company in “Big Bear.”

Nonetheless, Tanner may soon return to the Hollywood fray. He’s working on a screenplay in addition to his theater projects. He has no agent, however--since a previous agent became a producer, “no agent has understood my unwillingness to grab whatever industry dollars I can.”

Tanner would prefer to make a living as a playwright, but he hasn’t yet broken through what he calls “the L.A. theater glass ceiling.” Tanner describes “a great theater scene that’s very alive here” and talks about how he would like to work--or see his work--at a number of other L.A theaters, from the Colony to the Actors’ Gang to the Geffen Playhouse. But most of the theatrical producers who could pay playwrights a decent wage are in New York--and have little regard for L.A. theater, Tanner said. He further contends that his plays will never be at the Mark Taper Forum unless they’re successful in New York--and that they won’t be produced in New York unless they’re successful at the Taper. Taper officials declined to respond.

Tanner’s work has seldom left L.A. “Pot Mom” played the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago in 1998 in a production that Tanner didn’t like--”they thought I was a sun-soaked surfer guy, and they had surfer music on the soundtrack. It was presented like a sitcom, and the reviews said it was like a sitcom without jokes.”

Last year, however, a Washington, D.C., staging by Cherry Red Productions of “Zombie Attack!,” Tanner’s longest-running L.A. hit (co-written with Daley), drew enthusiastic reviews. Cherry Red artistic director Ian Allen said Tanner’s work “has more weight than people will easily give it credit for. He’s very good at making things seem realistic but adding a satirical backdrop that puts it in a strange context and allows him to comment.”

Earlier this year, a planned off-off-Broadway production in New York of Tanner’s “Bitter Women” collapsed when, Tanner said, one of the actresses decided to stay in L.A. for pilot season.

Currently, Tanner is working on “Cat Farm,” which he hopes will serve as a play for his friend and former “Roseanne” co-star Laurie Metcalf. He and Daley have resumed work on another project, “The Romans,” and he is discussing adapting his play “Teen Girl” into a musical with Hoffman, who has some theater music credits.

For “Big Bear,” Tanner has rewritten most of the second act, strengthened the character of a wisecracking secretary, used a title that he believes has more symbolic weight, and made the ending happier--”not in an unrealistic way,” he said, but in a way that’s akin to the ending of “The Apartment.”

The ending reflects the fact that he is happier, he said. He volunteered that he’s in love with Hoffman, a noted artist in L.A.’s underground rock scene. “There was no time for a relationship when I was at the Cast,” Tanner said.

Tanner sees a lot of himself in Billy, the character he plays in “Big Bear.” Billy learns “that he might prefer speaking from the heart to a big paycheck. And I guess I’m just as naive as Billy.”

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“Big Bear,” Third Stage, 2811 W. Magnolia Blvd., Burbank. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Indefinitely. $15. (818) 842-4755.