John Steppling (playwright)
Encyclopedia
John Steppling , born June 18, 1951, Burbank, California
, is an American playwright. 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.”
, 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.
. 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
.
, Jon Robin Baitz
, Martin Epstein, Kelly Stuart
, and John O'Keefe
.
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 1980s, 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.”
Developed for the Los Angeles Theater Centre, Sea of Cortez, marked a turning point in Steppling’s critical reception. Sylvie Drake, of the Los Angeles Times, wrote that the play was “powerful yet difficult to embrace because it is so terminally despairing and virtually humorless.”
Film director Barbet Schroeder
, helped finance the New York production of the award-winning Teenage Wedding, in 1991 of which New York
magazine drama critic John Simon
declared Steppling "an all-round no-talent".”
During this period, he continued leading 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 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 Bartolomé de las Casas
; Murdered Sleep and White Cold Virgin Snow were oblique commentaries on plays by William Shakespeare
.
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
.
’s King Lear
featuring Marian Opania
, and co-starring Mick Collins. The production was done in three languages: Polish, English, and Norwegian.
Towards the end of the decade, Steppling 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 Rissa, Norway and starred longtime collaborator, Lee Kissman.
Late in 2010, Steppling premiered Phantom Luck, Steppling cast his cousin, James Storm the lead role.
Recently married to Norwegian filmmaker Gunnhild Skrodal Steppling, he currently lives in Yucca Valley, California, conducting writing workshops in Hollywood and serving as the artistic director of Gunfighter Nation.
Burbank, California
Burbank is a city in Los Angeles County in Southern California, United States, north of downtown Los Angeles. The estimated population in 2010 was 103,340....
, is an American playwright. Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
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
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
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 life
Born in Burbank, Steppling was raised in Hollywood and attended Hollywood High. His grandfather, John StepplingJohn Steppling
John Steppling was a German-American silent film actor.He moved to America at a young age and entered film in 1912 aged 42. He starred in a total of 230 films between then and 1928...
, 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-BroadwayOff-Off-Broadway
Off-Off-Broadway theatrical productions in New York City are those in theatres that are smaller than Broadway and Off-Broadway theatres. Off-Off-Broadway theaters are often defined as theaters that have fewer than 100 seats, though the term can be used for any show in the New York City area that...
. His interest in theater was sparked when he saw his cousin, James Storm, perform in the 1971 premiere of Sam Shepard
Sam Shepard
Sam Shepard is an American playwright, actor, and television and film director. He is the author of several books of short stories, essays, and memoirs, and received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979 for his play Buried Child...
'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
Murray Mednick
Murray Mednick is an American playwright and poet. He's best known as founder of the Padua Hills Playwrights Workshop/Festival, where he served as artistic director from 1978 to 1995...
and Robert Glaudini
Robert Glaudini
Robert Glaudini, who goes by the name Bob Glaudini, is an American actor, playwright, director and teacher who is father to actress Lola Glaudini. He wrote a hit off-Broadway play Jack Goes Boating directed by Peter DuBois and starring the actors: Philip Seymour Hoffman, John Ortiz, Daphne...
.
Padua Hills Playwrights Workshop and Festival
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 FornesMaría Irene Fornés
María Irene Fornés is a Cuban-American avant garde playwright and director who is associated with the establishment of the Off-off-Broadway movement in the 1960s. Fornes themes focused on poverty and feminism. In 1965, she won her first Obie Award for Promenade and her second for The Successful...
, Jon Robin Baitz
Jon Robin Baitz
Jon Robin Baitz is an American playwright, screenwriter, television producer and sometime actor.-Life and career:Baitz was born in Los Angeles, California, the son of Edward Baitz, an executive of the Carnation Company. Baitz was raised in Brazil and South Africa before the family returned to...
, Martin Epstein, Kelly Stuart
Kelly Stuart
-Life:She lived in Los Angeles.She has been a New Dramatists writer in residence at The Royal National Theatre’s Studio in London.She lives in New York, and teaches in the Theatre Department at Columbia University.-Awards:* 2000 Whiting Writers' Award...
, and John O'Keefe
John O'Keefe (playwright)
John O'Keefe is an American playwright, director and solo performer. Notable awards include the 2002 Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for Times Like These, and a Bessie Award for Shimmer, which was also made into a motion picture by American Playhouse.Born in Waterloo, Iowa in 1940, 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 ForumMark Taper Forum
The Mark Taper Forum is a 739 seat thrust stage at the Los Angeles Music Center built by Welton Becket and Associates on the Bunker Hill section of downtown Los Angeles...
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
Humana Festival of New American Plays
Humana Festival of New American Plays is an internationally renowned festival that celebrates the contemporary American playwright. Produced annually in Louisville, Kentucky by Actors Theatre of Louisville, this prestigious event showcases new theatrical works and draws producers, critics,...
, in Louisville, Kentucky
Louisville, Kentucky
Louisville is the largest city in the U.S. state of Kentucky, and the county seat of Jefferson County. Since 2003, the city's borders have been coterminous with those of the county because of a city-county merger. The city's population at the 2010 census was 741,096...
and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize
Pulitzer Prize
The Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established by American publisher Joseph Pulitzer and is administered by Columbia University in New York City...
. Steppling was also hired to adapt Elmore Leonard
Elmore Leonard
Elmore John Leonard Jr. , better known as Elmore Leonard, is an American novelist and screenwriter. His earliest published novels in the 1950s were westerns, but Leonard went on to specialize in crime fiction and suspense thrillers, many of which have been adapted into motion pictures.Among his...
's novel 52 Pick-Up
52 Pick-Up
52 Pick-Up is a 1986 crime thriller film directed by John Frankenheimer. The film stars Roy Scheider and Ann-Margret and is based on Elmore Leonard's novel of the same name.-Plot:...
, directed by John Frankenheimer
John Frankenheimer
John Michael Frankenheimer was an American film and television director known for social dramas and action/suspense films...
.
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 1980s, 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
In the late 1980s, Steppling formed Heliogabalus with Theater Genesis alum Robert Glaudini. Steppling's Teenage Wedding, winner of the PEN Center Literary Award for Drama in 1987, originated as a Heliogabalus production.1990s
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, marked a turning point in Steppling’s critical reception. Sylvie Drake, of the Los Angeles Times, wrote that the play was “powerful yet difficult to embrace because it is so terminally despairing and virtually humorless.”
Film director Barbet Schroeder
Barbet Schroeder
Barbet Schroeder is a Franco-Swiss movie director and producer who started his career in French cinema in the 1960s, working together with directors such as Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette.-Life and career:...
, helped finance the New York production of the award-winning Teenage Wedding, in 1991 of which New York
New York (magazine)
New York is a weekly magazine principally concerned with the life, culture, politics, and style of New York City. Founded by Milton Glaser and Clay Felker in 1968 as a competitor to The New Yorker, it was brasher and less polite than that magazine, and established itself as a cradle of New...
magazine drama critic John Simon
John Simon (critic)
John Ivan Simon is an American author and literary, theater, and film critic.-Personal life:Simon was born in Subotica, Bačka, County of Bačka, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, later, known as Yugoslavia . He is of Hungarian descent...
declared Steppling "an all-round no-talent".”
During this period, he continued leading 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
In the early nineteen nineties Steppling founded Circus Minimus with Mick Collins and Cinda Jackson. Workshops were conducted at Jackson's The Lost Studio. 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 Bartolomé de las Casas
Bartolomé de Las Casas
Bartolomé de las Casas O.P. was a 16th-century Spanish historian, social reformer and Dominican friar. He became the first resident Bishop of Chiapas, and the first officially appointed "Protector of the Indians"...
; Murdered Sleep and White Cold Virgin Snow were oblique commentaries on plays by William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
.
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
Animal Factory
Animal Factory is a 2000 American film about life in prison, set in San Quentin and directed by Steve Buscemi.-Plot:Edward Furlong plays a young man named Ron Decker, who is sent to prison for drug possession, and Willem Dafoe is veteran con Earl Copen who takes Decker under his wing and introduces...
, (2000) directed by Steve Buscemi
Steve Buscemi
Steven Vincent "Steve" Buscemi is an American actor, writer and film director. An associate member of the renowned experimental theater company The Wooster Group, Buscemi has starred and supported in successful Hollywood and indie films including New York Stories, Mystery Train, Reservoir Dogs,...
.
2000s
At the beginning of the millennium, Steppling moved to Europe. After brief stays in Paris and London, he relocated to Poland, securing a teaching position at the National Film School in Łódź. During his time at Łódź, Steppling did an adaptation of William ShakespeareWilliam Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
’s King Lear
King Lear
King Lear is a tragedy by William Shakespeare. The title character descends into madness after foolishly disposing of his estate between two of his three daughters based on their flattery, bringing tragic consequences for all. The play is based on the legend of Leir of Britain, a mythological...
featuring Marian Opania
Marian Opania
Marian Opania is a Polish film actor. He has appeared in over 50 films since 1965.-Selected filmography:* Pearl in the Crown * Man of Iron * Dreszcze * Chopin: Desire for Love...
, and co-starring 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.Towards the end of the decade, Steppling 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 Rissa, Norway and starred longtime collaborator, Lee Kissman.
Return to Los Angeles
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.Late in 2010, Steppling premiered Phantom Luck, Steppling cast his cousin, James Storm the lead role.
Recently married to Norwegian filmmaker Gunnhild Skrodal Steppling, he currently lives in Yucca Valley, California, conducting writing workshops in Hollywood and serving as the artistic director of Gunfighter Nation.
Publications
- 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
External links
- http://gfnation.wordpress.com/
- John Steppling interviewed by Harvey Perr, BOMB Magazine