Tanner’s Cast Experiment Falters

A big question mark hangs over the future of the Cast Theatre.

For the last decade, the little two-space complex in Hollywood has housed the works of Justin Tanner, L.A.’s best-known home-grown playwright-director. Last April, Tanner and his longtime collaborator, Andy Daley, jointly split from their mutual producer and mentor, Diana Gibson, taking control of the theater with them. They began running the Cast as a duo, trying to transform it into more than just an exclusive Tanner showcase by producing the works of other writers and by bringing in a different director for the one Tanner play, “Bitter Women,” that was staged there last fall.

But the new plays didn’t attract audiences, and Daley left during the successful run of “Bitter Women.” Now Tanner says that he, too, has had enough. He wants to be only a playwright again--not the combination of producer, director, benefactor, technician and telephone answerer that he has been in recent months.

The season Tanner and Daley started will be aborted after the completion of the current run of “Mary’s Dream.” “The American Way” and “Tucumcari” are canceled, and a new play that Tanner and Daley were co-writing for May, “The Romans,” won’t happen at least until September--and maybe not at the Cast.

Both Daley and Tanner said that they couldn’t afford to run the Cast any longer. “Refitting the organization was very daunting. I was a volunteer with very few organizational resources,” Daley said, adding that Tanner “wasn’t willing to make the adjustment from being an artist to being an administrator. It wasn’t an equitable partnership.”

Tanner cited a disagreement over a particular play choice as another source of friction with Daley, but he said that he still wasn’t quite certain why Daley had, in Tanner’s words, “pulled the rug out from under us.”

Tanner tried to run everything on his own after Daley left. His earnings as a TV writer had long been one of the theater’s main financial supports. But even though “Bitter Women” was a success, “two months later the money from the play was gone.” And “the siphoning of my wallet is over,” he said.

In retrospect, the season was “way too ambitious,” Tanner said. In fact, he questioned whether “running a theater with new plays is feasible anymore, without funding.” Citing the low turnout for non-Tanner plays, he said that perhaps they were too dark and edgy. “Most audiences want to see plays that are funny or that move them, and you have to do what an audience wants to see if you’re going to keep going.”

Who will run the Cast now isn’t certain. The stage manager for last fall’s “Bitter Women,” Rebecca Smith, is filling in as interim administrator, Tanner said, and has already negotiated improvements on the structure with the landlord. But the theater may simply become a site for rented productions, at least for a while. As a nonprofit, the company has a board of directors. Though it hasn’t been particularly active, the board will ultimately decide whether to keep the company in business.

Running the Cast “really requires someone who isn’t an artist,” Daley said.

Daley’s continuing his career as a production designer, one of the many tasks he performed on Tanner’s plays. He designed the next Moving Arts production, “The Meadows,” opening Friday at Los Angeles Theatre Center.

CASTING CALLER: Amy Lieberman is the new casting director for Center Theatre Group, replacing the late Stanley Soble. It’s a homecoming of sorts: Lieberman directed casting for the Mark Taper Forum half of CTG from 1985 to 1988.

THE OUTSIDER: It wasn’t a great week for Christopher Plummer.

Not only was his touted performance in “The Insider” not nominated for an Oscar, but--with apologies to the actor--the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle withdrew his nomination for one of the group’s annual awards.

Members of the group erred when nominating Plummer for “Barrymore,” said LADCC President Debbi Swanson, because his local appearance in the show was in 1998, not 1999, so he wasn’t eligible for the current round of awards. He would have been eligible last year, but he wasn’t nominated.

He won’t be replaced on this year’s list, which will now total 59 nominees instead of the usual 60. The mistake also means that Center Theatre Group-affiliated shows received only seven nominations, not the previously announced eight, and therefore were edged out for the title of most nominated producer or presenter by the “Reefer Madness!” team.

Speaking of goofs, yours truly must ‘fess up to inadvertently eliminating the LADCC nominees for musical director from the list that appeared in Calendar on Feb. 9. With apologies to musical directors everywhere, the nominees are Lone Arranger Music for “When Pigs Fly,” Nathan Wang and David Manning for “Reefer Madness!” and Dan Wheetman for “It Ain’t Nothin’ but the Blues.”