Say Good Night, Sweet Prince, in Blessing’s Latest : Stage: Playwright takes the final scene of ‘Hamlet’ and continues the story tongue-in-cheek.

“Something is funny in the state of Denmark.”

Well, that’s not exactly how Marcellus puts it in Act I, Scene IV of “Hamlet.” He says everything is rotten. But playwright Lee Blessing looks at things a little differently in the world premiere of his play “Fortinbras,” which the La Jolla Playhouse premieres Sunday at the Mandell Weiss Theatre.

Although the play starts with part of the last dramatic scene of “Hamlet,” Blessing continues the story tongue-in-cheek.

“It starts with 3 1/2 dead bodies on the stage,” he says, “Hamlet’s on his way out. It covers the unfortunate reign--or fortunate, depending on how you look at it--of Fortinbras.” With his dying breath, Hamlet says Fortinbras “has my voice.”

Blessing’s sly smile punctuates the conversation as he continues. “That seems to me to mark the ultimate irony of Hamlet as a political creature. He seems to have been pretty inept. By being what he was and doing what he did, he created a rather awesome political power vacuum, which Shakespeare very unconvincingly tries to solve at the end of the play. You can’t kill off the royal family without providing a successor.”

The Prince of Denmark suggests that his successor be the Prince of Norway, Fortinbras. Blessing finds that amusing, considering the sketchy history Shakespeare provides.

The Fortinbras that Blessing has created, more pragmatic and Machiavellian than Hamlet, does take over Denmark, the playwright explains, “then what happens around Elsinore is that people who are recently dead show up again. Sooner than he expected there are ghostly emanations of the recently slaughtered.”

That’s when what once looked so “rotten” starts to get laughs. It’s definitely a comedy. “Very much so,” Blessing insists. “But I think it has other underpinnings. It has a political level.”

Besides being written in the modern idiom, the play has “plug-ins to the contemporary political world. . . . Any leader, in a sense, is a paradigm for all other leaders,” he said.

With that same dying breath, Hamlet wants Horatio to make sure the true story, the full story, gets told because, Blessing says, “if people just wander in and see a lot of dead bodies, it will look like Hamlet just went berserk. He did, but you know how people will talk. It will all get blown out of proportion. The first question Fortinbras has to deal with (is) ‘Is it useful to tell the truth, or should he construct a more workable story?’ And, it being a comedy, he chooses a more workable story.”

That sounds very much like the political methods we know today. That part of the playwright’s voice has a tone he’s using more and more in his work.

Blessing started writing plays in high school, but his goal then was to write poetry.

“I continued to write, unsuccessfully, plays that would horrify me now--until grad school at the University of Iowa. “By the time I left Iowa, I was more a playwright than a poet. I figured out, as little as you make as a playwright, you make less as a poet, so it was simply a move up the economic ladder. I think I’m the only person who ever did it for that reason.”

He did linger a while at Iowa in the late ‘70s for the simple reason that the drama department was producing his plays.

“That was good,” he said, “because it takes longer to develop as a playwright than any other kind of writer. Plays are fundamentally an emotional medium, and obviously the emotional and intellectual bases feed each other. It takes people longer to work things out and get an emotional overview.”

Are any of his plays from that period done today?

“No, no, we’re clever about that, we playwrights. The only one anybody drags up is ‘The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid.’ ” That play won the national playwrighting award at the American College Theatre Festival in Washington and, as a result, was published.

His later plays do not suffer from obscurity, however. Titles such as “Eleemosynary” and “Oldtimer’s Game” are as familiar to theatergoers as is another baseball play, “Cobb,” a Yale Repertory production seen last year at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre, and two plays commissioned by the La Jolla Playhouse, “Two Rooms” (1988) and “Down the Road” (1989).

Even more familiar is the only Blessing play to reach Broadway, “A Walk in the Woods,” a fictionalization of historic walks taken in 1982 by U.S. and Soviet negotiators during arms-control talks in Switzerland. Also a Yale production, the play was directed at Yale and La Jolla by La Jolla’s artistic director, Des MacAnuff. MacAnuff also directed the play’s Broadway production and stagings in Moscow and Vilnius, Lithuania. “A Walk in the Woods” also aired on PBS’s “American Playhouse” in May, 1989.

Said MacAnuff, who is directing “Fortinbras” at La Jolla: “Doing a Lee Blessing play is always an adventure. Lee is endlessly curious, and is always searching out a surprising new universe. It’s exciting to follow his curiosity.”

“A Walk in the Woods” began a departure of sorts for Blessing. He usually finds life full of comedy. “Woods” was the first time, he says, he had written a “consciously political play, trying to deal with a Page One sort of story.”

“After that, I wrote a couple of plays they commissioned at La Jolla, both of which were similar in some ways. They had a lot to do with how we interact with a story, with the way the media tell a story, with the way politicians mutilate a story--using the hostages in Beirut (“Two Rooms”) and a serial killer (“Down the Road”). Those three plays are related, I think.”

“Cobb,” about baseball great Ty Cobb was “a sports page play. In all the plays up to ‘Walk in the Woods,’ I’d used humor so much, I wanted to see what it was like to do a couple of plays where I wasn’t allowed to. With ‘Two Rooms’ and ‘Down the Road’ I picked subjects you really can’t make jokes about, very truthfully, anyway. And with ‘Cobb,’ too. It was more a shift toward certain kinds of themes and dealing with them in a serious way where I couldn’t rely on having a facility to write humor. It’s very relaxing now to go back and write something where I can go for the laugh. And comedy is one of the best passes at saying something serious.”

The Minneapolis-based Blessing works frequently and closely with his wife, director Jeanne Blake, who was dramaturge on both “Two Rooms” and “Down the Road” at La Jolla. She has just directed the second production of “Down the Road” for the Humana Festival at Actors Theatre of Louisville and will be directing the world premiere of another new Blessing play, “Lake Street Extension,” at the Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati in the spring of 1992.

There always seems to be a Lee Blessing play opening somewhere in the country, and he’s not at all concerned that “A Walk in the Woods” has been the only one to play Broadway, where it had a successful four-month run.

“You have to say to yourself, ‘Well, that’s when that happened, and that’s fine,’ but I don’t live in a world where all of my good work is going to go to New York. Plays that deserve to go to New York don’t always go to New York. So my job is simply to write the next play and continue to explore who I am as an artist.

“If another good thing like that happens, that’s fine, but I have to regard that with the same skepticism that I regard what happened with ‘A Walk in the Woods.’ There’s an element of freakish luck in any successful play. At some point you have to put all that away. It’s a goblin.

“There really aren’t the producers in New York there used to be,” Blessing continued. “They’re all kind of terrorized by the critical situation. ‘Cobb’ was at Yale Rep, and it got the best reviews I’ve ever gotten from the New York Times, it got strong reviews here. No producer’s ever come forward to try to take it to New York. I’m not here to second-guess them. I can’t spend my time trying to write for New York.

“The truth of the matter is that New York, in a large part, has been replaced by regional theater and resident theater as not only the place where a new American play originates, but where it’s done and where it culminates. And that’s not necessarily bad.”

Not bad at all. That’s why the Prince of Norway is at La Jolla, trying to prove that there actually is something funny in the state of Denmark, and that theater is actually where it really belongs.

“Fortinbras” plays Tuesdays-Sundays, 8 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday matinees, 2 p.m. Ends July 28. Tickets are $21-$29. For information and reservations, call 534-3960.