STAGE REVIEW : Another Walk on the Wild Side

It’s not easy to watch the plays of John Steppling. But he never intended it to be.

They exist on the edge of sociopathology. They move like light through fog. Their denizens are the wretched and trapped: bullies, hustlers, victims and drifters. They travel by Greyhound, haunt dingy motels, hang out in garages and crummy one-room apartments. They’re on the outside looking in, frozen in time and space. When they talk, it’s in redundant, monosyllabic sentences that throb with frustration, repressed violence, sexual tension or self-pity.

This was true of Steppling’s “The Shaper,” “The Dream Coast,” “Teen-Age Wedding,” “Standard of the Breed,” “Pledging My Love” (the latter two seen by this writer on tape) and now of “The Thrill” at Taper, Too.

“The Thrill” introduces a new environment, however: the ubiquitous mall, emblematic center of conspicuous consumption. Metaphor for rapacity and greed. Roaming its enclosed canyons, two friends, Linda (Diane DeFoe) and Beverly (Kate Dorman), follow their own internal tracks. Beverly, slightly older and duller, just wants to make assistant manager at her job. Linda, who is turning 21, is hunting for excitement. Her parents are divorced. She lives with an inattentive aunt (Pamela Gordon) and her aunt’s deadbeat lover, Perry (Robert Hummer). What Linda is after, in her own undefined way, is love and adventure.

Enter Nat Pink (Robb Curtis-Brown), aggressively and at fever pitch. Nat’s made to order: a sexy, dangerous, small-time hustler on the prowl. He comes with an older “partner,” Walter (the excellent John Horn). It is a mark of Steppling’s talent that he can make tangential and unanchored characters such as Walter key players in the lives of others and therefore important. Linda falls for Nat, tentatively at first, abjectly later. “The Thrill” is the thrill of their abortive, brutal, vitiated romance.

This, however, is not love at first sight. It’s like watching an accident. The relationship is wild, perilous and contemptible. You’re mesmerized. But there is a faintly optimistic ending here.

One can also follow this play more clearly than some of Steppling’s others. If “The Thrill” is about social impotence it is also about growing up. Nat’s rage and frustration are dark and specific. He wants in, and the world won’t have him. How can a nowhere man make his place in a society where money and/or celebrity equate power? His quest for an ideal is a wrenching cry for help. His desperation reflects his own deep-seated conviction that he’s not going to get the help he needs.

Linda, on the other hand, will make it. For all her scared submissiveness, she loved the guy. Her “I can’t wake up every morning and have nothing to do” is the first indication that she’ll find something, and that that something is not working in her aunt’s shop forever.

Still, Steppling is not for all. Not everyone will have the stomach or the patience for this piece. It rambles. It comes in sections that don’t readily connect. It creates a pattern, more than it does a story, but for those who can tune in, there is no denying the off-putting, feral power of “The Thrill.” Or its painterliness. This is a theater of images more than words.

And a theater that’s tough on actors, who are asked for a lot of emotional as well as physical stripping. The sex is minimal but graphic. The company handles the understated violence and repression well, but co-directors Steppling and Robert Egan need to remind their performers that you can’t whisper on stage, even in a house as small as the Taper, Too.

Some Steppling watchers sigh and wish he would get away from characters who are so “stuck” in their lives. They would like him to start tackling different subjects. It’s like wishing that Samuel Beckett had written musicals. The lonely, the weak, the nasty and the defeated are Steppling’s turf. He knows these people and reveals them in tortured, circuitous, but ultimately compelling ways, in a voice that remains uniquely his. It may be a sound you don’t want to hear, but it’s also a sound you don’t forget.

A personal wish list: more humor, sardonic or otherwise. That would be the surest sign of growth.

At 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. East, Tuesdays through Sundays at 8 p.m., with matinees Saturdays and Sundays at 2:30 p.m., until Feb. 18. Tickets: $16; (213) 972-7392.