Lee Blessing's drama, Two Rooms, about the relationship between the US and the Middle East, has a sadly persistent relevance. The playwright talks to Belinda McKeon.
In the weeks following the events of September 11th, 2001, Lee Blessing found himself receiving phone calls about a play that he had written more than 10 years previously. That play was Two Rooms, an unflinchingly dark exploration of personal suffering and political failure, of terror and of loss, set between a professor's study in America and a prison cell in Beirut. It had been produced to acclaim in 1988, and it was not a play of healing or of consolation. It was, as Blessing says himself, "not a play that was going to hand out easy entertainment," but one that would put audiences through "a very harrowing experience". It was a play that looked, with chilling frankness, at the state of the relationship between America and the Middle East, and that offered nothing resembling a solution, or an answer, or a note of hope. And it was a play that, by November of the same year, theatres in five different American cities had decided to stage.
"All of them asked me to update it at first, and I was willing to," says Blessing, sitting in the studio of the New Dramatists Theatre in midtown Manhattan. But he never got around to the task. "Because every one of them then called me a week later and said, you know what? You don't have to bother."
And neither will a word be changed for the play's Irish premiere later this month, when Focus Theatre will present it at Andrew's Lane Theatre in a production directed by Mary Moynihan. (Two Rooms will be the first time outside of its Pembroke Place home for the Focus; that home will be closed until the Focus team raises funds for renovations by staging work in larger theatres around Dublin.)
Simon Coury will play the abducted history professor Michael Wells, and Ann Sheehy is playing Lainie, the woman who finds herself at once trying to stay close to her missing husband and battling with the actions and positions of the government and the media when it comes to his fate. "It happens to be about such a chronic world problem," explains Blessing. "One that hasn't gone away, and that isn't going to go away tomorrow. Audiences watch that play, and it doesn't matter that it's set in Beirut 20 years ago. It's also now. And here."
Blessing, born in Minnesota in 1949, is one of the most prolific of contemporary American playwrights, whose work deals with consistently serious issues, from arms negotiations to child abuse. A Walk in the Woods, the play immediately preceding Two Rooms, was nominated for Tony, Pulitzer and Olivier awards, and Two Rooms was named Time magazine's Best Play of the Year in 1988. However, at least one audience member had deep misgivings about its revival in 2001.
Bruce Weber, theatre critic with the New York Times, argued that, in the light of the new attacks on America, the play looked "simple-minded" rather than relevant or insightful; that its "blanket demonisation of an Arab enemy" rendered it "too bland to be abrasive". Its time had passed, Weber insisted; for a new era of terror, a new drama was needed. An updated version, he believed, was the least that could have been provided.
Blessing believes that Weber's reaction to that production may have been symptomatic of a rawness and outrage felt by most New Yorkers in the immediate aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks. "I would wager that if he had seen that play six months or a year later, he would have given it a different review."
It's now almost five years later, and the extent to which Weber's criticisms might still stand is debatable. Relations between the US and the Middle East have hardly lessened in complexity; nor, indeed, has the question of enemy facelessness. Yet the situation which Two Rooms dramatises - an American man held hostage by Arab militants while his wife waits anxiously in the void left by his disappearance - has once again become bitingly real.
But to Irish audiences in particular, Two Rooms has resonances beyond the political - it recalls one of the best-known and most powerful plays in Irish theatre history, Frank McGuinness's Someone Who'll Watch Over Me, also set in a hostage situation in the Middle East. Both plays were written around the same time, and both confront the East-West conflict with bleak honesty, but Blessing says that he has never seen or read McGuinness's play.
This steering clear hasn't been a hostile act, though, or done out of jealousy; he smiles when I mention the play, and is quick to describe McGuinness as "a wonderful writer", other plays of whose he has seen and enjoyed. But he admits, too, that the success of McGuinness's play on Broadway, while his own play got an off-Broadway production in the same year, stung a little.
"I always felt that the [ original] production of Two Rooms should have been on Broadway," he says. "And whatever happened, it didn't go. So I said, well, it's good for Frank, and I'm delighted that a play about that got on Broadway. Every writer has to be somewhat self-protective. And I mean, to me, it was always a matter of feeling, that's a play I don't need to know. Everyone else can know that play. But I don't need to."
THESE DAYS, he says, he doesn't lose sleep over Broadway. At a time when New York's theatre district offers mainly rejigged musicals and European imports, in a year in which the acceptance speeches of several actors and directors at the Tony Awards made pointed reference to the glaring lack of new American plays amid the soaring scores and the even more soaring ticket prices, Blessing looks askance at the glittering strip and its merits. He's not alone, he says.
"I think American playwrights, for the most part, don't think about Broadway," he explains. "We don't take it seriously as the place we see as the ultimate destination for our work, for serious plays. A significant off-Broadway production is the ceiling that we set for ourselves. And even off-Broadway has had a terrible couple of years economically, and it has been very hard for producers there to make a dime on what they do. So they have become every bit as conservative, I think, as the Broadway producers."
It's now much more difficult to get challenging and provocative work staged in New York than it was when Blessing started out. "In 1988," he says, "on Broadway, as well as my play, you had Lanford Wilson's Burn This; August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone; David Henry Hwang's M Butterfly; and David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow. All five of those plays, all American, were on Broadway in that season. So many that Burn This couldn't be nominated for a Tony. And I don't think you will find another year since, in which so many strong American plays, serious American plays, were on Broadway. Now it's rare to find one or two."
Theatre producers are much tamer in New York now than was the case then, he says, and audiences are more timid.
The reason lies in the combination of increasing conservatism in the country and increasing commercialism in the business, and the climate it creates, Blessing argues, is hospitable only to tried and tested work from elsewhere. Hence the enormous success on Broadway this year of plays from Ireland and Britain.
"Plays from the British Isles and from Ireland," Blessing says, "tend to do very well here, because there's a sort of audience assumption that if they're from there, and they've come all the way over here, they must be very good. And often, that assumption is rewarded. But sometimes, I think, it makes American producers quite short-sighted about what to look for. And what to try to move audiences toward. Producers used to lead the audience a lot, back in the 1960s and 1970s. You know, come here, you're going to like this. And now they're following the audience. What do you like, what will you buy, and we'll provide that. And I think it's a more difficult time for playwrights."
Blessing's own solution to the problem is the attitude, and the approach, he has maintained since the beginning of his career as a playwright: his writing and pitching energies go toward the regions rather than the big cities. And, although the specifics of scale and of financial support are starkly different in Ireland when it comes to regional theatres and their clout, still you can't but wonder about the things that a dose of his kind of perspective might do for theatre in this country, where new work is originating less and less outside of the major urban centres.
"Sometimes it's a smarter economic move to keep your play out of New York for a long time," he says. "The mass of money I still make comes from regional production, it comes from amateur production. I make money from productions all over the country, sort of on a constant basis. And so I have great loyalty to those theatres. And to what that's meant for my career. It has really allowed me to continue to be a playwright."
Though distaste flashes across his face as he talks of commercialism in the theatre, it's clear that Blessing is a career-minded playwright, and that he has been that way from a young age; though he will not be led by producers' wishes and their preferences, he has a keen awareness of the marketplace and of his status as a co-producer of his own work. He will not write to order, as is shown by the sheer diversity of his ouevre, which resists categorisation. But, once he has written a play, he will keep a careful, canny watch over its life in the field. And he keeps a check, too, he says, on his expectations.
"Sometimes you think to yourself, well, did I get into this because I wanted to make a zillion bucks, because that would not have been wise, or is it because, you know, I have a calling. It's more of a vocation than a regular job."
He knows he has been lucky to have been able to support himself as a playwright throughout his career.
"You start to realise, oh, that's why I did this. That's my real goal. I've only discovered it lately. I thought I wanted to be on late-night TV and do lots of interviews and go out to all the right parties, but I don't think I do. I don't think I really care about that. I think writing another play that I'm excited about, that I think people respect and take seriously, that's my ambition. And I'm sad to say," he laughs, "that might be the sum of my ambition. We'll see."
Two Rooms is at Andrew's Lane Studio, Dublin, July 18-29
