With a combination of resignation and pride, Lee Blessing says he has not had a regular paycheck since 1973. He is, in short, a playwright, and one who has had a long and checkered run in what he calls “my buffet-style career.”
In the two decades since he had his first play produced, Blessing, 51, a native of Minneapolis and an alumnus of the University of Iowa Graduate Writer’s Workshop, has been on Broadway, off-Broadway and across the country in theaters of all shapes and sizes.
“A Walk in the Woods,” his two-man drama about an American and a Russian diplomat sharing some quality time in between official disarmament negotiations, is perhaps his most celebrated work. It was presented in New York, London and Moscow; on television and in almost every resident theater in the United States. But his most consistently produced play is the 1988 “Eleemosynary,” an affectionate, intricate and stimulating drama about three generations of women in one family, which has had several excellent productions in Chicago-area theaters.
Alert to his times, he has written such headline-oriented dramas as “Chesapeake,” about an avant-garde performance artist who kidnaps a despised senator’s pet dog, and “Patient A,” about a woman who accuses her dentist of giving her AIDS.
“Cobb,” in which the embittered and hated baseball star Ty Cobb is portrayed by three actors at various stages of his career, had its premiere in 1989 but made news just last season when actor Kevin Spacey, seeing its first off-Broadway mounting in New York, instantly wrote a check to keep the play running. “It was an extraordinary piece of luck,” Blessing says.
At the moment, however, Blessing is concentrating on Chicago, the city where his first produced play, “Oldtimers Game,” directed by Robert Falls, was presented in 1983. He is back here again this month for his latest play, “Rewrites,” which is to have its premiere March 19 at the off-Loop Dolphinback Theatre Company.
More Top Picks Best Reading Pens For Dyslexia
Even for a playwright whose career has taken him far and wide, introducing a play in a small, non-Equity theater in Chicago seems unlikely. But Blessing, here recently for a weekend of work with the play, finds it part of the normal procedure in his wide-ranging career.
“Ellen Larabee, the director,” he says, “is working on a Ph.D. thesis on my work, believe it or not, and since she has studied what I’ve written, she knew that a play called `The Rights’ had never been published. She told me she had this connection with a theater company in Chicago and would I consider letting them do it.”
Blessing likes challenges and agreed to the task. Soon he found his rewriting of the original text had turned into writing a new play, which he describes as “a comedy about dark things,” and which Dolphinback says “is set in a mysterious mansion, where a desperate TV executive returns home to exploit his troubled family in a reality-based television program.”
Later on this season, he will offer another new work, “Thief River,” in New York at the Signature Theatre Company, an off-Broadway operation that devoted its entire season to Blessing’s plays in 1992-93. The new work, Blessing says, “is a love story for two men, set over a period of 55 years, with three pairs of actors portraying the characters as young, middle-aged and old men.”
First, however, he will return to Denison University in Granville, Ohio, where he is teaching a course in playwriting. He has moved out of Los Angeles, where he worked for several years and where his marriage of 14 years ended in divorce, and is seriously considering a move to New York.
Whatever, he will continue writing plays. “It’s what I do most happily,” he says.
His career, never notable for any one single sensation, is nevertheless a source of satisfaction. “I don’t have to worry about any particular one,” he says. “If a theater puts on a play that hasn’t been as successful as the others, I can always say, `How nice. They picked the slow child.'”