Sea of Cortez and Other Plays

by John Steppling

The first collection of plays from the playwright of the acclaimed Dream Coast . Contains Sea of Cortez, Standard of the Breed, The Shaper and My Crummy Job .

182 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1995

Reviews

[Richard]

Steppling is incredibly talented playwright who's never gotten the acclaim he should have. He's as good as Mamet and Shepard and deserves to be as lauded. His dialogue is fantastic. Unfortunately, his fame never spread much further then Southern California, where his plays were produced in small theaters. He was also incredibly influential on a whole generation of other So Cal playwrights (look up the Padua Playwrights for starters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padua_P...). The four plays in this collection are some of his best, so get to it. They're spare snapshots of folks living on the edge in a nightmare version of Southern California; a series of fragmented, fast-paced glimpses of lost souls waiting for the big score, waiting for love, waiting for a cure, waiting for...something to save them from their fates. He wrote the screenplays for 52 Pickup and Animal Factory, if you need that kind of thing to spur you to read him.