John Steppling (playwright)

John Steppling (Playwright) American playwright, born June 18, 1951, Burbank, California. Los Angeles native, John Steppling became a prominent figure of the Los Angeles theater scene in the 1980s. 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.”

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 Steppling, a part-time actor and wardrobe assistant. His upbringing, at the fringe of the film industry, influenced his work, in particular, The Dream Coast.

NEW YORK

Steppling’s was influenced by New York's Off-Off Broadway. His interest in theater was sparked when he saw his cousin, James Storm, perform in the 1971 premiere of Sam Shepard's The Mad Dog Blues. During his time in New York, Steppling was introduced to the writers and actors associated with Theater Genesis, including Murray Mednick and Robert Glaudini.

PADUA

Back in Los Angeles, Steppling became a founding member of the Padua Hills Playwrights Workshop and Festival founded in 1978 by Murray Mednick and Sam Shepard. Steppling remained involved in Padua for most of its 17-year-long run, other notable playwrights associated with the festival are Maria Irene Fornes, Jon Robin Baitz, Martin Epstein, Kelly Stuart, and John O'Keefe.

1980s

In the 1980s Steppling wrote the plays Neck, Eddie Cottrel at the Piano, Close, The Shaper, and The Dream Coast. The Mark Taper Forum took an interest in his work and many of his plays were developed in Taper sponsored workshops.

The Shaper, (1984) was chosen for the ''Humana Festival of New American Plays'', in Louisville, Kentucky and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Steppling was also hired to adapt Elmore Leonard‘s novel 52 Pick-Up, 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. It was published in West Coast Plays the following year.

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.

At the end of the 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. 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. Steppling’s Teenage Wedding, winner of the PEN Center Literary Award for Drama in 1987, originated as a Heliogabalus production.

1990s

CRITICISM

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. It marked a turning point in Steppling’s critical reception. Sylvie Drake, writing in 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 yet difficult to embrace because it is so terminally despairing and virtually humorless.”

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. New York Magazine drama critic John Simon declared Steppling “an all-round no-talent.”

Steepling 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.

THEATRICAL GROUPS

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, Los Angeles 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 The Los Angeles Theater Center.

As the 1990s 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 Don Shirley 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 secured a teaching position at The National Film School in Lodz. During his time at Lodz, Steppling did an adaptation of William 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 (2002)

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 Russia, 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. 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 the 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 3, 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 1, 1991

DON SHIRLEY, Drawn Back to Padua Hills, Los Angeles Times ,April 1, 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 1, 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/