John Steppling (playwright)

John Steppling (Playwright) (born June 18, 1951 Burbank, California) is an American playwright living in Los Angeles. A Los Angeles native John Steppling became a prominent figure on the Los Angeles theater scene in the 1980s. Through his prolific output he has influenced a generation of playwrights including Jon Robin Baitz, Marlene Mayer, Kelly Stuart, and Michael Sargent. Los Angeles Times writer Richard Stayton noted that, “His oft-copied cinematic style--spare, elliptical, obscenity-spiced dialogue spoken by society's outcasts, framed in brief scenes between blackouts, archly paced--even spawned a critic's term: Stepplingesque.”

Described as, “A dark, brutal, neo-realistic painter in the theater,” Steppling has long held an uncompromising vision, even at the expense of career success. Los Angeles Times writer Robert Koehler, writing in 1986, considered Steppling’s plays “so resolutely stark that the staging of them for a paying audience seems like an act of nerve.”

Steppling’s work is populated with deracinated dreamers, petty schemers, and shiftless drifters, some angling for a big score, others already bled of all hope. For Steppling, Hollywood and environs is a noirish landscape, a deglamorized demi-monde that he has translated to the stage, shadows included.

While pigeon-holed as a “local” writer because his plays are most often set in the greater Los Angeles area-–low- rent Hollywood, The Valley, and the nearby desert--his work is deeply informed by European writers such as George Buchner, Franz Xavier Kroetz, Thomas Bernhardt, Nathalie Sarraute, and Edward Bond. These are writers Steppling has cited as influences, who, he says, “don't accept that the world is curable or that life is okay in the end. They aren't in a political void."

His taut, muscular prose, which verges on the edge of minimalism, delivers its message with hardly a trace of irony and virtually no sentimentality, placing him squarely in the late-modernist camp. His sensibility would not be foreign to European audiences but, as actor-critic Harvey Perr has pointed out, “The nature of tragedy, as Steppling understands it, is in direct opposition to the American dream.”

EARLY YEARS

Born in Burbank, Steppling was raised in Hollywood and attended Hollywood High. His grandfather, John Steppling, was a silent-film actor; his father, Carl, a part-time actor and wardrobe assistant. His upbringing, at the fringe of the film industry, influenced his work, in particular, The Dream Coast which originated from a story about his father and his friends.

NEW YORK

Pursuing an interest in music, Steppling gravitated to New York. where, in 1971, he saw his cousin, James Storm, act in the New York premiere of Sam Shepard’s The Mad Dog Blues. This was Steppling’s introduction to the Off-Off Broadway scene, in particular, the group of actors and playwrights associated with Theatre Genesis. In a 2002 interview with Don Shirley, Steppling remarked: “In about a minute of stepping through the door, I met many of the people who have subsequently deeply mattered in my life. Kathleen Cramer, Mednick, Bob and Nina Glaudini, Shepard, Tina Preston--most of the core that started Padua eight years later."

PADUA

Theatre Genesis playwright-in-residence Murray Mednick moved to Los Angeles in the mid 1970s and, along with Sam Shepard, founded the Padua Hills Playwrights Workshop and Festival in 1978. Steppling was invited, at Bob Glaudini’s recommendation, to participate in the first festival and was involved with Padua for most of its 17-year-long run. Among the Padua participants were Murray Mednick, Sam Shepard, Maria Irene Fornes, Jon Robin Baitz, Martin Epstein, Kelly Stuart, and John O'Keefe.

1980s

The nineteen eighties were prolific years for Steppling, who, in addition to contributions to numerous Padua festivals, put up some of his most influential plays, including Neck, Eddie Cottrel at the Piano, Close, The Shaper, and The Dream Coast.

The Shaper, starring Off Off Broadway veteran Lee Kissman, premiered in 1984, directed by the author. The play was a critical hit, chosen for the Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville, Kentucky, and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. It also attracted the attention of the film industry and Steppling was hired to adapt Elmore Leonard’s novel 52-Pick Up, which was directed by John Frankenheimer.

In 1986, The Dream Coast, inspired by Steppling’s father and his cronies working on the fringe of the film industry, opened at the Taper, Too, the same day 52 Pick-Up was released.

Robert Egan, former producing artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum, took a special interest in Steppling, While Steppling’s work was considered unsuitable for the Taper’s main stage, many of the playwright’s works were developed by the Taper’s new works program, the Taper, Too. LA Weekly theater critic, Stephen Leigh Morris, has written about the Taper’s one-time proprietary interest in Steppling and the organization’s effort to develop him into a “national playwright.”

At the end of the nineteen eighties, Los Angeles Times critic Robert Koehler could write of Steppling’s growing reputation as potentially “the purest, finest poet of the stage that Los Angeles has produced in this generation.”

HELIOGABALUS

The short-lived Heliogabalus, formed by Steppling and Bob Glaudini, was, in part, a means of extending Padua’s work beyond a few weeks in summer. It also provided an opportunity for Steppling to hone his pedagogical skills. In his workshops non-theater texts were used as points of departure for new theatrical work, establishing a blueprint for the group productions that Steppling would oversee in the following years. In addition, Steppling’s Teenage Wedding, winner of the PEN Center Literary Award for Drama in 1987, originated as a Heliogabalus production.

1990s

The nineteen nineties began with Steppling continuing his prolific output. In the first years of the decade, Steppling wrote and directed The Thrill, Standard of the Breed, Theory of Miracles, and The Sea of Cortez. Developed for the Los Angeles Theater Centre, Sea of Cortez, set in a laetrile clinic in Southern Baja. was, in many ways, classic Steppling and featured a remarkable cast, but the play marked a turning point Steppling’s critical reception. Sylvie Drake, writing the Los Angeles Times, characterized Steppling’s plays as “nightmare landscapes of the shriveled soul, somnambulistic and unremittingly depressing.” Steppling, in her summation, was practicing a kind of anti-theater that was "powerful but difficult to embrace because it is terminally despairing and virtually humorless.”

But Steppling still had powerful allies. Film director Barbet Schroeder, who had commissioned a script from Steppling about an American hustler in Thailand, helped finance the New York production of the award-winning Teenage Wedding, in 1991. The critics were indifferent, if not hostile. New York Magazine drama critic John Simon turned his review into an ad hominem attack, declaring Steppling “an all-round no-talent.” Steppling appeared to be tagged an L.A.-only phenomenon.

While he was no longer the critical darling from the 1980s, he extended his influence through his workshops, instructing new groups of students in Padua-informed techniques and challenging them with a far-reaching reading list that went far beyond the narrow confines of dramatic literature. In 1990, the late actor-director Rick Dean revived Steppling’s one-act, Neck (1982) which was a critical success. It had an extended run at The Lost Studio, run by Cinda Jackson.

CIRCUS MINIMUS

Heliogabalus was succeeded by Circus Minimus, founded by Steppling, Mick Collins and Cinda Jackson. Workshops were conducted at Jackson’s The Lost Studio and a tradition of Christmas Plays was established. Regarding the project, Steppling told Jan Breslauer, of the Los Angeles Times,“This is about more than theater; it's about ideas, the nature of performing and the creative process.”

Circus Minimus folded and was followed by Empire Red Lip, whose core members included former Padua students. Based in Silverlake, Empire Red Lip focused on collaborative projects, each stemming from intensive reading of a text, e.g., The Conquest of the New World, stemmed from the writing of Bartolome de las Casas; Murdered Sleep and White Cold Virgin Snow were oblique commentaries on plays by Shakespeare.

In 1998, Steppling organized Citizen Faust, along with playwrights Wes Walker and Rita Valencia, which ran at Los Angeles Theater Center.As the nineteen nineties drew to a close, Steppling supported himself with film and television jobs, including a staff position on the short-lived series Cracker, and a shared credit on Animal Factory, (2000) directed by Steve Buscemi. But he was unsatisfied with his situation in Los Angeles and on the verge of expatriation. “I was being offered teen movies, reactionary crime stories, and I wasn't making enough money to justify doing what I didn't like," he told an interviewer in 2002.

2000s

Steppling began the new millennium by moving first to Paris. There he appeared in a production of Mick Collins’ “Wino Time.” After a short stay in London, Steppling relocated to Krakow, Poland. He soon after secured a teaching position at the prestigious National Film School in Lodz. During his time at Lodz, Steppling did an adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear featuring Marian Opania, a Polish actor who had worked with Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Kieslowski, and co-starring the now Paris-based Mick Collins. The production was done in three languages: Polish, English, and Norwegian.

DOG MOUTH

Steppling returned to Los Angeles, briefly, to oversee the 2002 production of Dog Mouth, a play that was developed from a Taper workshop and was co-directed by the Taper’s Robert Egan. The play, his first full-length in almost a decade, was staged at the Evidence Room featured Stephen Davies, who had first worked with Steppling in Eddie Cottrel at the Piano, and James Storm. Towards the end of the decade, Steppling once again uprooted himself and moved to Norway where, in 2009, he wrote and directed a twenty minute film, Then They Recognized Me, with support of the Mid Nordic Film Commission. The film was shot in Russa, Norway and starred longtime collaborator, Lee Kissman.

RETURN TO LOS ANGELES

In 2009, following the birth of his first grandchild, Steppling returned for an extended visit and sowed the seeds of his eventual full-time return. In 2010, Steppling moved back to Southern California and organized a new theatrical concern, “Gunfighter Nation.” The inaugural production, The Alamo Project, ran at The Odyssey Theater in West Los Angeles. The group’s second production The LA History Project, marked Steppling’s return to The Lost Studio.

PHANTOM LUCK

Late in 2010, Steppling premiered Phantom Luck, only the second full-length play of his to appear on a Los Angeles stage in over a decade. As with 2002’s Dog Mouth, Steppling cast his cousin, James Storm in a key role, completing a circle that began in 1971 when Storm inspired him to pursue dramatic writing.

Recently married to Norwegian filmmaker Gunnhild Skrodal Steppling, the playwright is currently living in Yucca Valley, California, conducting writing workshops in Hollywood and serving as artistic director of Gunfighter Nation.

References

Absolute Disaster: Fiction from Los Angeles (Santa Monica Review Press and Dove Books), 1996;

Sea of Cortez and Other Plays (Sun & Moon), 1999;

West Coast Plays 21/22 (California Theater Council), 1987;

Best of the West (Padua Hills Press), 1991;

Los Angeles Under the Influence: 20 LA Writers, Their Influences and their work (Doublewide Press), 2002

ROBERT KOEHLER, Steppling: Dark Side Of Living, Los Angeles Times, November 03, 1986

ROBERT KOEHLER, The Thrill of Creation, Out on Theater's Edge, Los Angeles Times, January 21, 1990

RICHARD STAYTON, Two Lives in the Theater, Los Angeles Times, December 01, 1991

DON SHIRLEY, Drawn Back to Padua Hills, Los Angeles Times ,April 01, 2001

DON SHIRLEY, All Bite, Wherever He Is, Los Angeles Times, January 13, 2002

JAN BRESLAUER, Minimum to the Max. Los Angeles Times,December 12, 1993

SYLVIE DRAKE, 'Cortez' Explores Familiar Territory, Los Angeles Times, May 01, 1992

HARVEY PERR, Criticism Masks Lack of Insight, Los Angeles Times, May 18, 1992

JOHN SIMON, High and Dry, New York Magazine, August 5, 1991

STEPHEN LEIGH MORRIS, Call of the Wild: John Steppling’s Dog Mouth, LA Weekly, January 24, 2002

HARVEY PERR, John Steppling, BOMB 31/Spring 1990

T.H. McCULLOH, Saga of Stifled Lives in a Tacky Trailer Park, Los Angeles Times, July 10, 1990

http://www.axism.pl/artists/steppling_en.htm

External links

http://gfnation.wordpress.com/