STEPPLING: DARK SIDE OF LIVING

John Steppling writes the kind of plays that not only turn the idea of success into a nightmare, but are themselves so resolutely stark that the staging of them for a paying audience seems like an act of nerve.

His prolific output, though, keeps coming at us: “Neck,” “Exhaling Zero,” “The Insistence Upon the Listener,” a number of pieces for the Padua Hills Playwrights’ Workshop (of which he is associate artistic director), “Eddie Cottrel at the Piano,” “Close,” and “The Shaper.” The last three not only won audiences over, but awards as well.

Against all odds, Steppling’s rise continues with the openings Friday of both “The Dream Coast” at Taper, Too and the release of “52 Pick-Up,” for which he shares script credit with “Pick-Up” novelist Elmore Leonard.

What makes this double opening especially intriguing is that, while “52 Pick-Up,” starring Roy Scheider and Ann-Margret, is a mainstream Hollywood movie, “The Dream Coast” is about all those who come to Hollywood trying to wedge themselves past the door that leads to The Industry, only to have the door slam in their face.

“It’s extraordinary,” the playwright mused in a Taper rehearsal room as barren as one of his own set pieces, “but you can still find people coming here from Oklahoma with all these romantic notions about Hollywood. I see them, and those in ‘Dream Coast,’ as victims of these illusions.”

Did Steppling have his own illusions about working in Hollywood?

“It was a lot of fun, mainly because I didn’t have so much of myself invested in the screen writing. It’s (director) John Frankenheimer’s film, not mine, but we both had this strong desire to find the value in Leonard’s work, of which there’s a great deal. Leonard came in after me, for rewrites.”

Steppling has a two-picture deal with Cannon which, he says, “is serious about making good films.” Some might say that he has “made it.” But, he reflects, “if there’s a theme to the play, it’s that ‘making it’ is itself an illusion. At a certain point, when you get to the realization that there’s an emptiness at the center of this dream, I think it breeds an enormous rage.”

When you think “rage,” you usually think “loud.” Steppling’s characters are quiet, often waiting for something to happen in dimly lit rooms, pausing as if to let the blood boil a little more.

“People say they have a hard time feeling connected to my characters. I don’t expect audiences to cheer when they see ‘Dream Coast,’ but it pleases me that people get something from my work.”

He rolled his 8-inch cigar through his fingers and spoke about “The Dream Coast.”

“It began as a story about my father and his friends. He was wardrobe man on ‘Casablanca’ and other films. He also worked as an actor. I grew up in a part of Hollywood, near Fountain and La Brea, where you could walk into any apartment building and find someone with some connection to the business.

“Those who came over to our house during those years (the ‘50s and early ‘60s) were mostly very bitter men. They resented an industry they felt wasn’t supporting them.” Like Wilson and Weldon and the play’s other lost souls, “they were fringe people.”

“As always happens when I write, the story changed. When I’m really involved in the writing and it’s going well, the characters demand certain things of me. It’s a good sign. It means not everyone is going to sound like the playwright, which is usually the sign of a bad play. It’s really astonishing because I don’t quite know where all this stuff is coming from.”

Some presume, because of the dark tones coloring his work and the fact that he is a writer of and about Los Angeles, that it comes from a hate for this city.

A man of calm, subtly ironic demeanor, he shook his head. “I love Los Angeles. When I went to Louisville (“The Shaper” played there this year in the Humana Festival of New American Plays at the Actors Theatre), I gained a clear sense of how connected I was to Southern California. I mean, critics and audiences expected a show with palm trees and sun and ocean, but it wasn’t about that L.A. It was about the L.A. that’s under the surface. I just peel it away. I like this place, but I hate the system, the injustice, poverty and racism in this country. That’s bound to be in my writing.”

He believes, as well, that popular notions of entertainment are conditioning audience responses toward narrow expectations--bad news for the non-traditional, not-terribly-patriotic dramatist. “We’re not in the most exciting phase for American theater right now. I look to foreign playwrights, like Franz Kroetz, Thomas Bernhardt, Nathalie Sarraute, Edward Bond, who have an anarchy of the spirit. They don’t accept that the world is curable or that life is okay in the end. They aren’t in a political void.”

He looks, too, to the master of the void, Samuel Beckett. During “Dream Coast” rehearsals, actor Alan Mandell has regaled the cast and co-directors Steppling and Robert Egan with stories of his days with Beckett.

“Alan talked about how Beckett directs,” Steppling smiled, “that he ‘conducts’ the actors. He finds every comma crucial. I really understand that.” With his actors, director Steppling “insists on getting every word right--though all my written-in pauses sometimes make them wonder.

“Bob (Egan) and (Taper dramaturge) Jack Viertel have really eased the transition (from the play’s work-in-progress status as part of the Taper’s 1985 New Theatre for Now festival). This is the first time when I’ve felt 100% interest by the producing institution in the work and not in what audiences were going to think. They simply want me to get what I want. On top of that, I have this luxury of my actors being with me so long. Ten years. That’s so rare in American theater.”

Even though Steppling enjoys directing, and even though he wants to direct films, he keeps his grounding as a writer. “Beckett once remarked,” he said, “that it gets harder and harder to write an honest line. An audience knows when they’ve heard it. And it’s scary. That’s what I’m after.”