Steppling’s Desert Light

Anne Kelly-Saxenmeyer
Mirror contributing writer


   An article about a group of hobos who had formed a Mafia-like alliance became the inspiration for “Dog Mouth,” the newest work by playwright/director John Steppling. “This once romantic subculture had become a criminal organization. And all the guys had been in Vietnam, so it just reverberated with symbols,” recalled Steppling in comments from his home in Krakow, Poland. “There was also a picture of this very pretty young girl who was pregnant with [their leader] Dog Man Tony’s baby. I started thinking about that relationship and what it was all about. These were people who were not on anyone’s demographic. Nobody wanted to try to sell these people anything. They had no importance, officially, until there was a crime committed.”
   The Steppling-directed American premiere of “Dog Mouth” marks the playwright’s return to the local stage after a 10-year absence. I admit it was also my introduction to Steppling, once heralded as the quintessential playwright of his native L.A. Perhaps most striking for this newcomer – aside from Steppling’s intriguing mix of animal menace, tilted humor and hard introspection as delivered by a rare cast — was the way the play moved.
   The characters are wanderers, in the fullest sense. In the course of the play, Dog Mouth (Stephen Davies), the head of a now dwindling organization of train-hopping hobos, travels from somewhere in the Mojave to somewhere outside Phoenix to see a man called Weeks (Hugh Dane) about a fighting dog that he may or may not want to buy. The naive, pregnant Nyah (Nia Gwynne) comes along, reluctantly, as uncertain as we are about the real purpose of the trip. Between Dog Mouth and his lean, nervous lieutenant, Becker (James Storm), there is also a plot to kill a man named Mueller who has violated some obscurely referenced code.
   Amid faltering movements from here to there, there is much thinking out loud. It often revolves around seemingly static points of identity: Dog Mouth’s disgust with consumer culture butts against recurring references to a television news interview that has breathed new life into his legend. Nyah is constantly asking him, Have you ever killed a man? And the question becomes more important than the answer, keeping Nyah, as well as Storm’s utterly convincing Becker, begging at the master’s feet. Dog Mouth’s reputation is also maintained by his past breeding of winning dogs, and it’s in the vernacular of dog fighting that the strong — Davies’ booming, resonant Dog Mouth and Dane’s fierce, compelling Weeks — offer their personal philosophies. Still, seemingly static. Yet through some miracle of Steppling’s pacing or the subtlety of his inquiry, there is at the end of nearly every scene a very slight but surprising perspective slant, a skipped beat.
   It can be compared to the shifting desert light that is used so effectively by lighting designer Ryan Rand. Unlike Steppling’s character shifts, the lighting changes are sometimes slight and sometimes extreme, going from a dusk that makes you squint at the players to a shocking midday sun. Along with sound designer Karl Lundberg’s back-road traffic sounds and his barreling, screaming trains, the whims of the light create an indisputable forward thrust, denying the stillness of the wanderers and of Jason Adams’ striking, stolid landscape: a diorama of desert panoramics cut by a diagonal train track, raked and lined with broken glass, surrounded by sand. From Mojave to Phoenix, the set changes ever so slightly.
   The total effect is an acute and persistent awareness of mortality, people evolving at a barely perceptible pace against time barreling down like a train. It is not the dynamic of most drama, but perhaps closer to the dynamic of real life. There is something viscerally disappointing about it. But it mad me want to see the play again.
   “Dog Mouth” presented by Padua Playwrights and Evidence Room at the Evidence Room, 2220 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles. Thurs.-Sun. 8 p.m. Jan. 12-March 3. $20. (213) 381-7118.