A Web Spun of Money : Playwright’s own experience leads him to write ‘Tarantula’ about a woman whose course in life is determined by an early inheritance

To paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, the very rich are very different from you and me. What is that difference? That’s one of the question marks in enfant terrible playwright Michael Sargent’s “Tarantula” at the Cast Theatre.

The tarantula of the title is a wealthy old woman nearing the end of her life, under the care of a chauffeur and his beach bum friend. She is played by Tina Preston, an actress known for attacking and taming improbable roles in plays by Sargent, John Steppling and John O’Keefe. She is far from the 90ish, maybe 100ish, heiress of the play, but has some idea what might make the old woman tick.

“There’s this kind of process of remembering,” Preston says, “this pathology of grandiosity. This creature has been formed by this life she’s been given, this being in the eye of the public and the whole thing.”

Preston feels it is something that happens to everybody, that how life is presented to us as children affects how we view life later on.

“Things happen too fast when you’re children. It’s a devastating experience, whatever it is that happens in your life that gets you out of touch with your center and reality. The fact that this woman got all this money when she was very young, the money and the grandiosity, this person is starved inside.”

Playwright Sargent, who is co-directing with David Schweizer, was first represented in Los Angeles theater with his one-acts “Honkytonk Man” and “Big Boy.” Then came his 1990 play “I Hate” and two one-acts at Theatre / Theater under the blanket title “Knockouts.” He won several awards for playwriting. But, Sargent says, the critics were beginning to say he could only write about lowlifes.

“Well,” Sargent said in reply, “I’ll write you the richest woman in the world. You think I don’t have a wider vocabulary?”

That wasn’t the only reason Sargent chose this character as a central figure. At the point of writing “Tarantula,” he was thinking a lot about money. His family once had money, but while he was at UCLA he watched them go bankrupt. And suddenly, he didn’t have money, and was having fantasies about being awash in it. He created the character of the heiress to satisfy that fantasy; from then on, the play came easily.

“Then I just brought in all my obsessions and psychoses,” he says, “and worked them out.”

This is the first collaboration between Sargent and Schweizer, who has worked in a similar manner as co-director with Steppling. Before working with Schweizer, both playwrights usually directed their own plays.

Schweizer, who began his career as a protege of Joseph Papp and is known to Los Angeles audiences for his work at the Mark Taper Forum and Los Angeles Theatre Center, among other venues, was attracted to Sargent’s work because of what he calls the author’s voice and tone.

Schweizer says: “I like to work with people like Michael, who doesn’t exactly need the same kind of director someone else might need. He has a very strong theatrical vision of his own work. The director can do a lot, but doesn’t have to start from scratch. It’s unnecessary. They’re capable of directing their own work. But it can be better if there is enlightened input, because it just takes it one step further. I don’t feel there are any hard and fast rules, like a writer should never direct his own work. Michael has a feeling for actors, a feeling for setting up scenes, and at the same time is very open to input on every level from a director he trusts.”

Sargent and Schweizer have, as they put it, been “hanging out” for about a year. This is not the only project they’re working on. There’s also a film, called “Sugar Daddy,” with a screenplay by Sargent. It’s about a Las Vegas entertainer and has been accepted for production.

“It’s an exciting fulfillment on all levels,” Schweizer says.

They talk a lot about finding drama territory together, the glitz of Las Vegas, a rich old woman on a lonely isle.

If he had to describe Sargent’s work, Schweizer says, “It’s like Tennessee Williams meets Joe Orton. Michael has a lethal edge. I also think he’s really a poet. There’s a level of poetics, a level of tenderness of feeling in his work that’s in very striking juxtaposition to the subversive, lethal edge, and the dark humor of the characters.”

There’s also a special community in which Sargent, Schweizer and Preston exist. It might be called avant garde, but it really is a family of sorts. Like Steppling, Sargent frequently uses the same actors production after production. Preston has worked with him before, and “Tarantula” was written with her in mind.

This also attracted Schweizer. He says: “The thing I really empathized with was the people he chose to work with. It was a wonderful, intuitive, sensitized thing in terms of their contribution to his work and his contribution to their acting.”

Preston adds: “It’s a wonderful thing in this town, to have kept a kind of community like that, for all the people involved. I don’t think theater can exist fully without that. It takes relationships, depth and intimacy, and growing. All that really enriches the artistry. It’s hard to maintain in this town.”

“Tarantula” plays at 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 7 p.m. Sundays at the Cast Theatre, 800 N. El Centro Ave., Hollywood. Indefinitely. Tickets: $15. Call (213) 462-0265.