‘Drop Dead’ Funny : A sitcom-writing team has finally allowed one of its plays to be produced here, after thousands of shows elsewhere

One of the great success stories to come out of the small theater world is the writing team of Billy Van Zandt and Jane Milmore.

Their plays, written mostly for a tiny theater in New Jersey, were a springboard to prosperous careers in television. Since 1988, they have been writing teleplays. They were staff writers at “Newhart” and “Anything But Love,” and co-produced and wrote CBS’ top-rated show of 1990, “I Love Lucy: The Very First Show.” Currently, they are supervising producers on “Nurses,” a Witt/Thomas sitcom debuting on NBC this fall.

Through it all they have continued to write plays, in part because it’s lucrative--their plays have received more than 15,000 performances, according to Van Zandt, by theater companies in the United States, Canada, South America and Europe.

The team would be shining examples to any budding playwright slaving away out here, hoping to stay in theater while building a big-time career in TV.

Except that in Los Angeles, almost no one knows them as playwrights. None of those 15,000 performances have been in this city.

“That’s on purpose,” said Milmore, who has acted in several made-for-TV movies and sitcoms. Until now, the pair wouldn’t allow their plays to be done in Los Angeles. “This is an industry town and we didn’t want one to be seen here unless we had some kind of control,” she said.

They are very much in control of the production of their play “Drop Dead” that will finally mark their local debut. The farce, which opened this weekend for a four-week run at the Court Theatre in Los Angeles, features them as actors and Van Zandt is directing. They also, with producer Mitch Nedick, put up the money to have the show done.

“OK, let’s do it,” Van Zandt called out to his cast at a recent rehearsal. The cast includes TV veterans Rose Marie, Adrienne Barbeau, Don Most (known as Donny Most when he was in “Happy Days”) and Barney Martin. Van Zandt had no need to call them twice--the cast was clearly having a good time at the rehearsal, which was on a sound stage at the KTLA complex in Hollywood. “You get so many chances to chew up the scenery with this play,” said Rose Marie with gusto, just before she went on for the second act.

The actress, best known for playing Sally Rogers on “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” has appeared in countless sitcoms. Her career started on radio in the 1920s, when she was known as Baby Rose Marie.

“This is the first time I’ve ever done something for nothing,” she said.

“Drop Dead” is being done in a theater with fewer than 100 seats, which allows the producers a waiver from the usual union rules. “But I read the script and it was very funny. And hell, I didn’t have anything else to do at the time, anyway.”

Since she took the show, the actress has been hired for several guest spots and been booked to do her concert act. Because the play is presented only on weekends, she and other cast members are able to work elsewhere.

“Drop Dead” is a murder mystery, a backstage romp about the warring cast of a Broadway show. Rose Marie plays an aging actress who is hard of hearing and cannot remember her lines. Van Zandt plays a down-on-his-luck director named Victor Le Pewe and Milmore plays a porno actress who got her break on Broadway because of her “friendship” with the producer.

It’s not exactly subtle, and that’s just fine with Van Zandt.

“I started out as an actor, but when I came out here to look for work, there were no jobs for someone who was a comic actor,” said Van Zandt, who arrived in Hollywood in 1978. “All they wanted was stand-up people, comedians, for those roles.

“I am not a funny person, but I can work at it.”

Van Zandt did get work in small roles on several movies, including “Taps,” in which the other featured players were Tom Cruise, Sean Penn and Timothy Hutton. “I was the only member of the cast not to later become a superstar,” Van Zandt said.

He was also in “Jaws 2” and the first “Star Trek” movie. It was on the latter set, in 1979, that he started writing. “With all the waiting around, I was so bored that I got a typewriter and began to work.”

Van Zandt teamed up with Milmore, whom he met at a summer student theater program in New Jersey. She was also getting some acting work, but not much in her forte, comedy.

“From the beginning, the idea behind writing the plays was to give ourselves good parts to play,” Van Zandt said. “It was a vehicle for us to do gags.”

The first play was “Love, Sex and the IRS,” which they did that same year at a tiny theater, the Dam Site, run by friends in Tintin Falls, N.J. It remains their most financially successful, having been done by small theater companies across the country and in Germany. “We can’t imagine what they think of the IRS there,” Van Zandt said.

Since then, the team has written a play a year of the same ilk, as is evident by a selection of the titles: “The Senator Wore Pantyhose,” “Playing Doctor” and “Having a Wonderful Time, Wish You Were Her.”

With one exception, all of their 15 plays have been published. Producer Grant Tinker read one three years ago and liked it enough to hire them to write scripts for his production company. They were assigned “backup” scripts for series in the pilot stage. The backups are used if the show sells, but the ones they worked on never did.

After that, they landed jobs at “Newhart,” which Van Zandt termed “the greatest place to learn we could have hoped for.”

Even with their success in television, they never considered dropping the annual ritual of writing, producing and appearing in a play. “It’s nice for us,” Van Zandt said. “In theater, you don’t have to explain everything to some development moron.”

The play they never published is “Drop Dead,” with which they have continually tinkered since it was originally mounted in New Jersey in 1985. “I always thought that this was a play we could one day take to Broadway,” Van Zandt said.

They did a local reading of it earlier this year. Barney Martin, whom they met while writing an episode of the sitcom “Sydney,” urged them to put it on here. Nedick, the chief financial officer at Grant/Tribune Productions, stepped in to produce. He worked out a budget of $37,000 for a limited run at the Court and cast the show, mostly with performers with whom they had previously worked.

If the show is a hit, there will be talk of moving it to a larger, Equity house. That would mean, however, serious fund-raising and expanding the performance schedule.

“It would cause a lot of problems,” Milmore said, explaining that the nights they are not in rehearsal are spent on rewrites or tapings of “Nurses.”

“But,” she said with a smile, “those are problems I wouldn’t mind having to work out.”

“Drop Dead,” by Billy Van Zandt and Jane Milmore, plays at 8 p.m. Fridays, 7:30 and 10:30 p.m. Saturdays and 3 and 7 p.m. Sundays at the Court Theatre, 722 N. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles. Tickets: $18 and $20. Call (213) 466-1767.