Playwright Blessing Reads Between the Headlines

Lee Blessing doesn’t even blink as a piercing scream comes from the Warren Theatre just a few feet away from where he is sitting, gazing happily at a cloud.

Of course it is a familiar scream. Blessing wrote it for “Down the Road,” a play about a serial killer that will premiere Sunday at the La Jolla Playhouse.

But doesn’t the high-pitched shriek rattle him the least little bit?

“It’s just a prerecorded off-stage scream from a clip for a serial killer movie,” he explains with a shrug. And the play as a whole is so nonviolent that he is sure it will be of no interest at all to people like his stepson, 15-year-old Andrew, who is a “ big fan of slice and dice movies.”

A nonviolent play about a serial killer?

The play is not about the serial killer as much as it is about the people who are interviewing him for a book, Blessing said. The real story is about how Americans mythologize murderers and how that may contribute to the startling statistics that show the number of serial murderers increasing 100-fold in the last 30 years.

“Down the Road” is the latest in a series of life-threatening subjects for Blessing that began with “A Walk in the Woods,” a story about arms negotiators who cannot dissuade their governments from stockpiling enough arms to blow up the world, and “Two Rooms,” a tale of an American hostage kidnaped and killed by unnamed terrorists in an unnamed land. All have been produced by the La Jolla Playhouse.

“All three plays are about ways in which media manipulation is going on,” Blessing said.

“In ‘Two Rooms’ you can see parallels to the current hostage situation on the part of the U. S. government and the Israeli government and Hezbollah. No one is saying how are we going to get these guys back. Getting them back is a low priority for all of them. What they are all trying to do is manipulate the headlines.”

The headlines have been following Blessing’s plays for the last two years. News reports about breakthroughs on nuclear arms negotiations flashed over the airwaves, to be followed by denials by the Soviet and American governments just as “A Walk in the Woods” went into rehearsal at La Jolla. During previews of “Two Rooms,” the Associated Press printed news of an impending hostage deal. Now as “Two Rooms” goes into a second production at the Cricket Theatre in Minneapolis this fall, the killing of Marine Lt. Col. William R. Higgins puts the hostage situation back on the front page.

On Thursday, the third preview night of “Down the Road,” a mail carrier named John Merlin Taylor in Escondido shot and killed two other postal carriers, a woman believed to be his wife, and wounded a clerk.

If Blessing himself seems curiously relaxed just three days before opening night of a play he is still rewriting, that’s probably because of the way success has changed the 39-year-old playwright’s life in the last year and a half. He knows, he says, that this play is not “a make or break thing.”

Since graduating from the famed University of Iowa graduate writers’ workshop in 1979, Blessing, who still lives in his native Minneapolis, used to write one play a year. Since “A Walk in the Woods” became his first play to make it to Broadway in February, 1988, productions of his work have multiplied. He followed “A Walk in the Woods” to Washington for a special performance for members of Congress and Cabinet officials, as well as London and Moscow for its openings there (it also is scheduled for productions in Lithuania, Israel, Germany, France and Japan as well as being readied for a national tour with Anthony Quinn). He has written three plays since that time: “Two Rooms,” “Cobb” and “Down the Road.”

One thing Blessing does not want in “Down the Road” is to be mistaken for a writer who is capitalizing on the public’s appetite for gore. The commercial appeal of his timely subject matter is coincidence, and he chooses a topic because the idea challenges him as an artist, he said.

His early plays, products of his boyhood loves, baseball (“The Oldtimers Game”) and the Wild West (“The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid”), gave way to women’s themes in “Independence” and “Eleemosynary” when he met his wife, director and dramaturge Jeanne Blake.

“She woke me up to many women’s concerns,” he said.

“Down the Road” began with a feeling of repulsion for serial killers and ended with disgust at a violent society in which such people thrive and multiply.

“My work has paralleled my personal maturation process, if one can speak hopefully,” Blessing said. He predicts that personal journey next will take him to a comedy with “light happy music.”

But even that won’t be a departure, he explains. Rather it will fit in with the one goal he has set himself from the beginning of his career: “To write good plays and have people like them.”