Writer Lee Blessing on plays, inspiration
Lee Blessing may not be as famous as David Mamet or Edward Albee, but he is still something rare in the theater world: a playwright who gets produced. And not just one or two titles, but dozens, including his best-known, the Cold War drama “A Walk in the Woods.”
The awardwinning writer is a favorite at Theatre Artists Studio, the north Phoenix co-op run by member actors, directors and designers. In 2011, it delivered a top-notch production of Blessing’s “Eleemosynary,” a family drama about three generations of women with incredible intellectual gifts but a serious failure to communicate. On Friday, April 12, the studio opens 2008’s “Great Falls,” a road-trip play about a middle-age man and a teenage girl driving westward through the Rockies. She claims she’s been kidnapped, but the reality is more complicated.
Blessing, a Minnesota native, talked about his nearly four-decade career on the phone from Los Angeles, where he now lives.
Question: What inspired “Great Falls”?
Answer: This play came out of some lessthan-happy personal circumstances, my own divorce and the end of some personal relationships that were connected to that. So I guess I got interested in the possibility of writing about a man who was in a similar situation who made different decisions than I did — who decided to try to rescue one relationship out of a difficult divorce situation, in this case with a former stepdaughter. So I thought, “Let’s just see how bright an idea this would have been.” Because people have impulses like this, and if they’re wise they don’t follow them. But the Monkey Man (as the stepfather is identified) is an example of somebody who gives it the old college try and gets punished for his efforts.
Q: In addition to “A Walk in the Woods,” one of your most-produced plays is “Eleemosynary.” Was that also inspired by your life?
A: At the time, I was assigning myself plays that had only women in them, because my earliest plays had only men in them, and I wanted to explore writing more female characters. I had just written a play, “Independence,” which had three sisters, so I thought why don’t I try three generations of women instead.
Q: The granddaughter in that play is a spellingbee champ, which let you play with a lot of fun but obscure vocabulary. Where did all those great words come from?
A: I had a friend who was a poet, and I was visiting him and he had a journal out, which I was invited to look at. And one of the pages he had was full of the kinds of spelling words that “Eleemosynary” contains. And I asked him about them and he said they were all words he loved, but he could only sneak in one per poem, because people didn’t have the patience to keep getting up and looking up the word. And I thought, how could I get a number of these words into a single play?
Q: Your plays are driven more by character than by plot. What kind of stories are you attracted to?
A: I’ve written political plays, family plays, baseball. I’ve written two plays based on Shakespearean tragedies. I never know where the