STAGE REVIEW : ‘Standard of the Breed’ Standard Steppling Fare

After several plays--the latest being “Standard of the Breed,” at the Cast Theatre--it’s clear what John Steppling’s subject is: Entropy. Set a top humming, and it will run down. So will the universe in time. Stasis is the natural order of things. So why start the top spinning at all?

Freudians call this the death instinct. Steppling’s characters are particularly susceptible to it. They make feeble efforts to get their lives together, but they’re not surprised when it doesn’t work. They’re like flies on flypaper--moving but unfree. Defeat is what they have been bred for.

How to find drama in lives so inert? It’s Steppling’s major problem as a playwright (and director): to keep entropy from setting in in the audience as well. “Standard of the Breed” doesn’t totally avoid it. But--in the writing, at least--it provides more hope for its characters than usual, and therefore a reason to keep watching them through the gloom of the production.

Jack, for instance, almost dances. Jack (Robert Glaudini) is a blackjack dealer in an Ely, Nev., casino, but his life is centered on breeding English mastiffs. Even though this passion will be thwarted, one welcomes the recognition in a Steppling play that people in the real world do get turned on to things--one of the ways the life instinct fights the death instinct.

Then there is Teela (O-Lan Jones), who has just lost her job at the casino. Teela says gloomy things like “at some point in your life, everything seems about like everything else,” and yet she is by no means a depressing presence.

The life force is strong under the words. She, too, loves to do something: sing. And when one man leaves her (Harvey Perr), she simply crawls in with the next one (Michael Collins.) She knows what she needs. She knows “how it works.”

Diane DeFore is only learning how it works--and we’re not sure she does learn anything, except how to leave. What she is leaving for, may be a repetition of the experience she has had with Collins. But she has got a puppy with her, which may relate to the life force too.

We don’t see the puppy, or the Nevada sunshine, or anything else which might suggest that these characters aren’t stuck in the bottom of a mine shaft. And Steppling as director again decrees that his actors speak their lines as slowly as if they were on Thorazine. There’s more life in the play than that.

Plays Thursdays-Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 7 p.m. Closes Aug. 28. Tickets $12. 800 N. El Centro Ave . (213) 462-9872.