Analysis
Lee Blessing’s off-kilter playfulness and ability to humanize contemporary issues onstage have made his latter plays popular productions in American theaters. Blessing, best known for his imaginative interpretations of factual events, has examined everything from AIDS to nuclear arms to the life of Ty Cobb. Sometimes criticized for simply skimming the surface of these issues with his work, he tends to telescope his issues into a few, key human characters. Supported by an abundance of playful wit, his strength lies in his marriage of entertainment value to substantive dialectic.
Blessing’s work can be divided into two parts: his early work, characterized by realism and family drama, and his later, post-Walk in the Woods work, in which he primarily takes on current events. The earlier work, which also includes his strongest emphasis on central female characters, is less adventurous and therefore less remarkable, following linear structure and internal realism more strictly. The later work becomes increasingly imaginative, playing with form, theme, and character in a way his first few works do not.
His experiments with structure most often take the form of a sort of soliloquy in the style of William Shakespeare, in which characters alone onstage directly address the audience with narratives, commentaries, or character revelations. This soliloquy device is present in one form or another in almost half of his works. Through his entire body of work, Blessing’s fascination with nature as metaphor is evident, as his characters often digress into long descriptions of animal or insect behavior to illustrate certain metaphorical character points or bigger pictures. Other notable characteristics of his writing include a consistent seriocomic cleverness and a reliance on the symbolism of light and dark.
Eleemosynary
Blessing’s first play to really demonstrate his excellent command of language, Eleemosynary is the most successful of Blessing’s family drama works, an examination of how three generations of women use language and to what end. The three women use language—specifically spelling bees—to both connect and distance themselves from one another throughout the course of the seven-scene play.
Eleemosynary was written as part of a self-assignment on Blessing’s part to write plays with central female characters, as a reaction against a theatrical climate in the mid-1980’s that was still less than insistent on the need to portray strong women. His most successful effort to grapple with lead female characters, Eleemosynary resembles his earlier Independence in its structural use of three central females.
The play represents Blessing’s first real experimentation with structure. This modified narrative has the three women sometimes acting as storytellers and at other times as characters-in-the-moment, marking out a loose plot that spans the lives of all three. Blessing’s device of having characters break the fourth wall to speak directly to the audience is used to good effect here, as he examines the relationship between cruelty and love in families.
The three women in Eleemosynary are, in typical Blessing form, a celebration of idiosyncrasies, each bucking the terms of society in their own quirky way. An openly eccentric grandmother, a mother who leaves her daughter to pursue research, and a daughter who memorizes the dictionary to become a spelling champion all find solace in their ability to hide behind the artifice of knowledge.
A Walk in the Woods
Blessing’s only work to reach Broadway, A Walk in the Woods achieved a level of success and popularity that the playwright has not since duplicated. This work seemed to buck the escapist tendencies of Broadway at the time, bringing to stage an honest examination of the pitfalls of Soviet-American arms negotiation.
One of Blessing’s issue plays, A Walk in the...
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Woods sloughs aside the complicated technicalities of arms negotiations in favor of a look at the humans behind them. The play is based loosely on an actual event in which two negotiators left the table to take a walk in the woods, only to come back with a simple agreement that both governments rejected. Blessing, though, does not hold fast to these characters, opting rather to create two fictional ones through which he can speak his wisdom on the subject.
Praised on one hand for humanizing a complicated issue and criticized on the other for oversimplifying it, Blessing does make some smart points through likable cynic Andrey Botvinik and gruff idealist John Honeyman. We see these two walking through the woods on four occasions, one to mark each season. The play’s revelation—an echo of popular sentiment about the seeming endlessness of the talks—is the idea that for both sides, the quest for peace is secondary to the appearance of the quest for peace. In Andrey Botvinik, Blessing provides a character defined by his eccentricities: Botvinik is an arms negotiator who prefers to talk of Mickey Mouse rather than cruise missiles, a lovable cynic. Botvinik’s wacky brand of resignation is foiled by Honeyman’s American-style down-to-business optimism.
Timely and popular at the time of its opening in 1987, at the height of the arms talks, A Walk in the Woods has become somewhat dated because nuclear warfare has ceased to exist as a simple Russian-American dichotomy. Though the play speaks in enough generalities to still make valid political points, its fuzzy wisdom is unfortunately no longer directed toward a living target.
Fortinbras
One of Blessing’s most successful comic endeavors, Fortinbras is a sort of annex to the story of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (pr. c. 1600-1601), continuing where Shakespeare left off and examining the possibilities of Elsinore under Fortinbras’s command. Though not blatantly so, it was written in response to the U.S. involvement in the Gulf War. The play is the story of a strong power coming in to take over a failing government, but bumbling and creating its own disaster, despite its good nature. Blessing examines whether brute force without reflection—embodied in the character of Fortinbras—is really superior to the brooding yet inactive Hamlet.
Fortinbras is a kind of man’s-man character, who in Blessing’s treatment, is concerned solely with acting promptly and decisively. He tramples on Horatio’s desire to tell Hamlet’s story and preserve his legacy, and he opts instead to blame the murder of the royal family on a Polish spy because it makes more sense, creates a common enemy for the country, and creates a necessity for Fortinbras’s strong leadership. Fortinbras’s tendency to miscommunicate leads to disastrous results and thwarts Horatio’s attempts to exorcise past demons and, in the end, is responsible for Fortinbras’s downfall as well as much of the comedy of the play. The play features the ghosts of nearly every character in Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, each returning in ghost-of-Hamlet style to urge revenge. The end of Blessing’s play, like that of Shakespeare’s, is bloodshed to a fantastic degree. Fortinbras is one of Blessing’s funniest and most often produced works.
Patient A
Another of Blessing’s trademark contemporary issue plays, Patient A was commissioned by a theater on behalf of Kimberly Bergalis, the first documented case of AIDS infection by a health care worker. Bergalis was criticized in the media for claiming to have done nothing wrong—a seeming indictment of other AIDS victims for having committed wrongdoing.
Patient A takes neither side of this issue; rather, it is an exploration of media stereotypes surrounding the AIDS crisis, a narrative of Kimberly’s story, and a catalog of the experience of living and dying with AIDS. Blessing juxtaposes the extraordinary case of Kimberly, who received media attention, an invitation to address Congress, and special treatment because of how she was infected, with the ordinary case of Matthew, a gay man who received no such attention and died in anonymity. The play avoids taking sides but rather invites the audience to think about both cases and raise questions about how victims of AIDS are treated in hospitals and portrayed in the media.
Patient A marks one of Blessing’s most structurally adventurous plays. He uses three actors: one to portray Kimberly, one as a utility character who plays Matthew as well as various other people who interact with Kimberly, and one to portray himself interviewing Kimberly. The characters mostly speak directly to the audience, working in tag-team fashion to relay the narrative of the story. There are short vignettes in which Kimberly and Blessing or Kimberly and Matthew interact separately, and they are woven into a continuous one-act pastiche. Blessing intersperses verses from the Andrew Marvell poem, “The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Fawn,” throughout the play, using it as a conceit to Kimberly’s story, as well as an example of how he as a playwright uses poetry to relate to—and avoid relating to—the human suffering involved in this subject matter.
