John Steppling

John Steppling (born June 18, 1951 in Burbank, California) is an American playwright, screenwriter and teacher.

Steppling's plays have been produced in the United States and Europe.

He received fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, a residency at the McDowell Colony and has received PEN-West, LA Weekly and Dramalogue awards for his theatrical work.

Born in Burbank, Steppling was raised in Hollywood and attended Hollywood High.

His mother was a former beauty queen turned bookmaker who suffered from alcoholism.

His father, Carl Steppling was a part-time actor and wardrobe assistant in community theatre.

His grandfather, John Steppling, was a silent-film actor who appeared in many Essanay films.

Steppling has noted that his upbringing moving from neighborhood to neighborhood in L.A with a family at the fringe of the film industry influenced his work, in particular, The Dream Coast.

His experiences of the "seamy underside" of Los Angeles influenced the characters in his plays, which often concern the marginalized of American society.

Steppling's introduction to theater came from New York's Off-Off-Broadway stage in the 1970s, where he saw his cousin, Jim Storm, perform in the 1971 premiere of Sam Shepard's The Mad Dog Blues.

During his time in New York, Steppling moved in the circles associated with the writers and performing artists of the group "Theater Genesis", including Murray Mednick

Returning to Los Angeles, Steppling became a founding member of the Padua Hills Playwrights Workshop and Festival in 1978 along with Murray Mednick and Sam Shepard.

Steppling remained involved in Padua for most of its 17-year existence, among other notable playwrights associated with the festival such as Maria Irene Fornes, Jon Robin Baitz, Martin Epstein, Kelly Stuart, and John O'Keefe.

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 some of his plays were developed in Taper sponsored workshops.

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.”

In the late 1980s, Steppling formed Heliogabalus.

The Shaper, (1984) was chosen for the Humana Festival of New American Plays, in Louisville, Kentucky and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

At this time Steppling also worked as a writer for hire for Hollywood, notably adapting Elmore Leonard's novel 52 Pick-Up, directed by John Frankenheimer.

In 1986, on the day of the theatrical release of 52 Pick-Up, 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 play 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 during this period.

While Steppling's work, which is both emotionally and politically downbeat and aesthetically challenging in the modernist tradition, 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.

In this era, the word "Stepplingesque" entered the parlance of Los Angeles theatre world.

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

It was later staged in New York, as was Sea of Cortez (At Home for Contemporary Theatre and Art).

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 Center, 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.”

In 1990, 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.

The 1990s also saw Steppling undertaking film and television, including a staff position on Cracker and wrote the screenplay for Animal Factory, (2000) directed by Steve Buscemi, based on the Edward Bunker novel.

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: The Conquest of the New World, for example, stemmed from the writing of Bartolomé de las Casas; Murdered Sleep and White Cold Virgin Snow were oblique commentaries on plays by William Shakespeare.

Steppling wrote the screen adaptation for Eddie Bunker's Animal Factory, which was directed by Steve Buscemi and starred Willem DaFoe, Edward Furlong, and Mickey Rourke.

Film director Barbet Schroeder, helped finance the New York production of the award-winning Teenage Wedding, in 1991 of ''New York magazine.

During this period, Steppling continued leading workshops.