Writing plays can be the best revenge

In certain L.A. neighborhoods, you’ll find that for every private, cavernous soundstage hosting movie or TV or video shoots, there’s also a sub-100-seat theater that serves live productions to the public.

Like different body parts of the same giant creature, the two kinds of stages often work symbiotically. The jobs on the sound stages attract hordes of actors to Hollywood, but the little “legit” theaters keep those hopefuls active, visible and relatively fulfilled in their hearts -- if not their wallets -- while they await the often less satisfying but paying work in the “industry.”

Not surprisingly, one of the topics that often appears in the plays within L.A’s sub-100-seat theaters is Hollywood itself, and the struggles of Hollywood’s wannabes to achieve success. “Write what you know,” beginning playwrights are often told, and what many of them know well is the search for Hollywood fame and fortune.

Recently this theme has been especially prominent in L.A.’s small theaters. Four plays have offered strikingly distinctive perspectives on the Hollywood quest. Two cover the intersection between Hollywood and drugs but offer views that are 180 degrees apart in their assessment of where the problem lies. The other two take diametrically different attitudes toward Hollywood -- the writer of one hopes to turn his play into a TV series, while the other’s writer identifies Hollywood as “the center of hell.”

Roger Kumble’s “Turnaround,” at the Coast Playhouse, is probably the best known of the four plays because two of its actors, David Schwimmer and Jonathan Silverman, are TV stars -- an exception to the usual casting of small productions with actors who have not scored major successes on screen. (Schwimmer leaves the cast at the end of the month, to be replaced by Mark Feuerstein, also a sitcom star in “Good Morning, Miami.”)

Despite the glamour attending his cast, writer and director Kumble’s script suggests that some things in life matter more than Hollywood success -- a notion that might not seem radical but one that may not have occurred to some of the people most likely to see “Turnaround.”

This is the third play Kumble has written about tunnel-visioned Hollywood strivers. He began the series with “Pay or Play” in 1993 because his screenplays, although earning some money, weren’t being produced, he said. It was a lot easier to get a play produced.

Kumble relishes the theater’s relative freedom. He said he resents the R ratings received by two movies he recently directed, “Cruel Intentions” and “The Sweetest Thing.” On stage, without any considerations of MPAA ratings or TV censors, he can say whatever he wants.

In “Turnaround,” one of the mid-level Hollywood characters is the object of a drug intervention, and easy access to drugs is depicted as part of the downside of Hollywood upward mobility. Justin Tanner’s “Hot Property,” at the Evidence Room, also features a drug intervention in the plot. But as Tanner’s protagonist climbs up from the lowest rungs of Hollywood and the 99-seat theater world -- under the wing of a woman producer who takes over his management and his bed -- he drops the drugs.

It’s part of an overall impression conveyed by “Hot Property” that Hollywood success isn’t so bad, at least when compared to the dismal milieu that the character leaves behind. Another hint in that direction: Tanner’s program bio says, “He is proud to be currently employed as a writer on ‘Gilmore Girls,’ Tuesdays at 8 p.m. on the WB.”

“Hot Property” was inspired in part by the sudden fame of French Stewart, a former member of Tanner’s theater group in the ‘90s, after he became a regular on “Third Rock From the Sun.” The script includes not-so-veiled references to the Cast Theatre, where Tanner and his friends produced most of the programming in the ‘90s, and to Cast producer Diana Gibson, Tanner’s mentor for many years (the deus ex machina manager in the play is named Diana).

Asked about the impression his work conveys of being sanguine about Hollywood, Tanner said that’s not what he intended. He likes his “Gilmore Girls” job, but its quality and happy working conditions are rare in TV-land, he said. He sees the character’s movement toward Hollywood success as moving “from the frying pan into the fire.” Diana’s Malibu retreat is “escape on one hand and a prison cell on the other.”

Tanner acknowledged that the ending needs further work. “If I hadn’t been so rushed, the play would have a third act where we see how disillusioned he becomes.”

Another Hollywood play at the Evidence Room, the now closed “Cringe,” also had problems with its ending, which was changed halfway through the run and then returned to the original. But the most striking thing about “Cringe” was the utter bleakness of its depiction of Hollywood as a magnet for coarse, grasping, craven people.

“Cringe” writer Peter Nieves is the one who told The Times that Hollywood is “the center of hell.” Hollywood is intent on “avoiding reality -- trying to be entertaining while closing our eyes to the world,” he said.

So it’s fitting that his play is based on the Don Juan legend, for the famous lover ends up in hell. Nieves’ Don Juan surrogate, a screenwriter named Jack Cringe, doesn’t have affairs with everyone in his path. “Too obvious,” said Nieves. Instead, the attractive Jack “tortures them by not sleeping with them. It’s the cruelest thing he can do in a town where everyone sleeps with everyone else.”

Although Nieves has read scripts for movie producers, he has spent less time creating Hollywood product than the writers of the other plays. But he has a close-up view of Hollywood from another vantage point -- a job as a maitre d’ at a trendy Hollywood restaurant, which explains why “Cringe” opens with an eviscerating dinner party in a similar establishment.

“Blockage,” at the Whitefire Theatre in Sherman Oaks, offers the most benign picture of Hollywood among the four plays.

It depicts two writing partners whose friendship is threatened by jealousies both professional (one has been writing his own scripts on the side and has struck it rich with one of them) and personal (a woman, who’s not involved in Hollywood but fancies herself a slam poet). While the play demonstrates “how chasing the brass ring changes people and their relationships,” said playwright Rick Bitzelberger, it doesn’t seriously question whether the brass ring should be pursued.

In fact, Bitzelberger wants to develop the play into a sitcom, preferably a “Larry Sanders”-style cable series. “I don’t ever want to censor myself,” he said. “I take jabs at the industry. But I can’t completely condemn and curse the industry that I want to be a part of.”

A small theater, with live audience feedback, Bitzelberger said, is “an ideal proving ground” for this kind of material. “I know there is a snobbery among some theater folk who disdain TV writing in the theater,” he said. Another of his plays was derided by critics as too sitcom-like, and “at first I was insulted. But then I thought, ‘Wait, I want to write for a sitcom.’ Writing is writing is writing.”

That sentiment is dubious, considering how disparate these four plays are. And it’s healthy that not all Hollywood plays look alike. In the L.A. theater, there is room for both “Blockage” and “Cringe.”

While no one wants every play to be about Hollywood, there probably isn’t a better place to examine the beast than from its own belly.