The Art and Craft of Playwriting

by Jeffery Hatcher

  Jeffrey Hatcher: You grew up in Minnesota, in a suburb outside Minneapolis. Did you see a lot of plays when you were young?

  Lee Blessing: The first experiences I had with drama were at high school. I was at school when the Guthrie Theater started. My family was not a theatergoing family, and I don't think I saw any shows there until the second season. The first production I ever saw was Saint Joan. So by the time I was beginning to experience any theater at all, I'd already written a play—done in a “barn,” so to speak.

  Hatcher: Do you think there's a difference between writers who are able to experience plays at an early age and writers who, for whatever reason—education, the city he or she grew up in—aren't able to see plays until later in life?

  Blessing: I think it might affect how quickly you develop. A kid who grows up in New York with parents who are avid theatergoers, and who's been going to see plays since he was ten, well, his abilities as a playwright might develop more quickly, and he might be writing plays in his twenties that maybe I wasn't writing until I was in my thirties. I think that's possible.

  Hatcher: What's the difference between the plays you wrote in graduate school at the University of Iowa in your twenties and the ones you wrote six or seven years later?

  Blessing: For me, it's been a very gradual and even progression in terms of my abilities as a writer, as I matured as a person—assuming that's occurred. So I don't think there have been big moments of change. When I was starting out writing plays, the big pitfall was that the dominant playwrights in the world, whose influences were felt in America, were mostly Europeans, like Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, Harold Pinter, theater-of-the-absurd playwrights. Playwrights who had nothing to do with the American tradition of playwriting. And yet those were the writers I read first, and quite avidly. Of course, at the same time I was reading Shakespeare and Shaw and Sophocles. These things didn't tend to go terribly well together, and, again, none of them was in the rich American tradition of the previous one hundred years. So I was rather lost, I think, when I first started writing plays. I didn't quite understand how you did it. I'd read Eugene O'Neill, but again he's a rather unusual playwright. So the first thing I had to do was unlearn how to write like a theater-of-the-absurd writer because I slowly came to realize that wasn't what I had to say. It was a style that wasn't getting me anywhere.

  Hatcher: Do you think a lot of writers imitate a style they're drawn toward? Even if it isn't their own?

  Blessing: Constantly. I noticed it in writing poetry. The writers I enjoyed the most were those who, when I tried to imitate their style, eluded me. I ended up with terrible poetry. I'd read a Theodore Roethke poem or a James Wright poem, and try to write that way, and it didn't get me anywhere. The same thing can happen in drama. They're wonderful writers, but they're just not me.

  Hatcher: At what point in your development as a writer did you become aware of the audience? Some playwrights say they never think about the audience while composing a play.

  Blessing: That's really an individual concern. If they think too much about the audience, they'll become self-conscious. When I'm writing the play, I don't spend a lot of time consciously thinking about the audience. But every time I think about writing a new play, one of the questions I know I have to ask myself is does an audience care about this? Do they care about it in the same way / do? If they don't, can I get them to? Do they have a strong investment in this issue anyway? Because if they don't, it's a big climb to get them to.

  Hatcher: When you get an idea for a play, do you think it tends to come from one source, or do they come from all sorts of things: an overheard line of dialogue, a place, a concern …?

  Blessing: Sadly, from a lot of different sources. Otherwise I'd just go back to the same old one.

  Hatcher: Is it hard to pick and choose?

  Blessing: It can be. If I'm fortunate, I find something I'm excited by, and I get an idea and it stays with me. I don't ever write a play I haven't thought about for a couple of months—and often for years. This is to make sure that at least I continue to be interested. It's a lot of work to write a play, and why would you do that unless you continued to be fascinated by it?

  Hatcher: When you're thinking about a play, be it a year or so, or a couple of months, is there a particular process you've come to depend on?

  Blessing: It's changed. A lot of this has to do with the opportunities that have been presented to me combined with the work patterns one has. Before A Walk In the Woods, I would be writing a play, and no one would be much concerned with that fact. And I would get the play read at The Playwrights' Center, and if it went well I would rewrite the play, and if it went badly, I guess I'd rewrite the play more, and then I'd have a second reading there or at New Dramatists in New York, or something like that. And ultimately I'd try to interest theaters. From first draft to premiere, mis might take a couple of years. After A Walk in the Woods got done in 1988 there was a period of years in which I got a lot of commissions to write plays for theaters. There was a commission every year. And when someone says, “We'd like you to write a play, and we're going to do it next year,” you really only have about a year to put a play together from conception to a producible form, and that's not a great deal of time, as you know. It's enough, but barely enough. In the case of some of those plays, I'd missed that early process of getting a play read in a sit-down reading, and felt I had to go back and do a second production of the play, considerably rewritten, to feel as if I was really finished with what I wanted to do with it.

  Hatcher: Is there a particular period of gestation, from conception to production?

  Blessing: I'd hate to characterize it. Some plays get written very quickly. The first draft of A Walk in the Woods got written very quickly. The first draft of Patient A got written very quickly. But with Patient A, that draft came after two years of planning and research, whereas some plays have stuck with me and taken quite a while. The play I'm writing now is one I've been thinking about for a year and a half. And things get in the way as well. As my wife, the director Jeanne Blake, and I have done more television and film writing, suddenly playwriting, which doesn't pay as well and as dependably, has to find its own niche in the amount of time you can spend on it. It's always a complex sort of calculation, so in a sense I couldn't say it takes two years to write and complete a play. But generally for me it does.

  Hatcher: When you get an idea for a play, what comes first: the big idea? The setting? Situation? Or do you always see a person?

  Blessing: It's usually more related to people than concepts. Sometimes I'll give myself an assignment. If I' ve been writing certain sorts of things or emphasizing certain sorts of ideas in plays, I do the opposite. So after the first few plays, which were all about men, I assigned myself some plays with women. But beyond that, there was no specific assignment. They didn't have to be any particular women in any particular place with any particular dramatic problem to solve. I wrote Independence and then Eleemosynary and the assignment was: no men. Just don't write men in these plays. Later, after completing Riches, which was a husband/wife play, I decided I wanted to write something that was really more off page one, the news, a headline kind of play, a public issues kind of play since I'd never done that. I didn't know which public issue I wanted to write about, but eventually it occurred to me that it would be interesting to write about arms control. A Walk in the Woods got started that way. After that, I gave myself another assignment. From my first play through A Walk in the Woods, all of the plays I'd written had a great deal of humor in them, and used humor a lot to entertain, even in my most serious plays. So—for some odd reason—I decided to banish humor from some plays for a while and write about things I really couldn't joke about.

  Hatcher: Were you conscious in choosing those subjects that by banishing humor it would be good for your writing, a good challenge? That in the challenge you would develop some different muscles?

  Blessing: That was the point. The point of not writing me
n is to write women better. The point of not using humor is to make sure I'm not using humor as a crutch. To feel as though I can encounter a serious theme and treat it in a serious, sober manner and still make that entertaining, still make people want to watch that.

  Hatcher: When you get an idea for a play, do you know where your characters are going to go? Do you start writing the play before you know the end?

  Blessing: All my training taught me that you have to know the climax before you write the play, otherwise you don't know what it's going to do to the audience, and therefore you don't know why it exists. By far, the most efficient way to write a play is to know where it's going. And I still think that's true. But it's hard to do that all the time because one also has to maintain a sense of interest and wonder and excitement about the journey as one is writing. And writing takes a long time. If one is still trying to write exactly the same moment that one conceived three months earlier or six months earlier, it may feel a little stale by the time you get there. So I'm always alive to a play growing and changing as I write it. I do tend to have a plot plan when I start. It's not always the strongest feature in my mind when I think about the play. The characters will be stronger. The way they say things will be stronger. The relationships, the premise, are all more vivid to me than perhaps where it's going to go. But if I don't have a very strong clue as to an action, a climax that's going to compel me as well as an audience, then I'm not terribly confident that the play is going to work out as a good piece of writing.

  Hatcher: Have you ever mapped out a play—decided where it was going to go, identified its climax—and then somewhere along the way moved away from that route and found a more interesting way to go?

  Blessing: Sure. That happens. I've heard that was true of A Streetcar Named Desire. Tennessee Williams had fully intended to take it one way and about half way through the writing he saw a different route that was far more interesting and took that. That certainly can happen, and so it's important to stay alive to possibilities. There are times when you realize, suddenly in the middle of writing it, that you can take the play much further, that it could be about much more than you thought it could be about. Sometimes the fruit of writing characters well is that you suddenly discover they're far more interesting people than you'd ever expected them to be.

  Hatcher: Isn't there a difference, though, between a playwright who chooses a route, chooses a climax and then discovers a different route or climax, and one who starts off without a route?

  Blessing: A considerable difference.

  Hatcher: Is it because a decision on a climax means your writing is being pulled toward something, even though you may abandon the climax you've chosen?

  Blessing: Sure. The conscious mind and the subconscious mind are both working on anything you're writing. You may have all these conscious intentions, this conscious road map for where a play's going to go, and subconsciously something else is going on.

  Hatcher: Is there a way, when you're working on a script, to lean in to that subconscious? You've planned the plot, you've structured it, but now you want to look for the clues in the woods.

  Blessing: For me, it goes back to my background as a poet. When I'm writing a scene, I try to stay alive to things that develop or dialogue that comes along which has a resonance with everything that has gone on, with the characters as they are developing, with the ways they've been speaking, with the linguistic possibilities they have and are still developing as the play goes on. So, in a sense, it's almost a matter of one's “ear” picking up things. And it's an “inner ear” that tells you when you come across something valuable, something that you should pick up and carry with you on your journey. And it may lead you down a different path. That's when it can become an exciting process.

  Hatcher: Do you make these discoveries in character, action, dialogue, images …?

  Blessing: In all those areas. And the different path I'm speaking of may be a path that ultimately gets you near the same goal you anticipated getting to in any case, but the route you may get there by could be different and richer and more surprising. Sometimes it can take you somewhere totally different too, and that may be a virtue for the work and it may not. That's when you have to go back to your fundamental reasons for writing the play and check your work against that. Have you ultimately created something that people can get a genuine emotion out of, one that they not only feel but know what to do with? And really I like that tension between what you planned to do and what you did at the moment. It's very valuable.

  Hatcher: You've worked in the theater for over fifteen years, with various directors, actors, designers. What have you learned about the theater, and about your own writing, by working with collaborators?

  Blessing: You learn a tremendous amount. Certainly you learn a great deal about how what you write needs to be a useful tool for somebody to take on to stage and speak in a three-dimensional medium and make real in front of other people. You can't write a line or a moment that you yourself would be embarrassed to perform, assuming you had all the talents of a good actor. So over time, by working with any set of actors or directors, you learn a certain level of respect for the medium.

  Hatcher: Sometimes you hear playwrights talks about actors who've taught them about the length of a line of dialogue—this is a question, say, of breath control and how playwrights often don't realize the stamina it will take to get through an overwritten speech. You'll also hear playwrights talk about how some parts of plays are more difficult for actors to memorize than others because there's something missing in the emotional or psychological through-line, scenes that don't have a clear intent or a clear objective.

  Blessing: I'm leery of things that are as technical as worrying about the length of a line and an actor's breath. When 1 used to act, I remember doing Shaw, and I remember what a challenge it was to me, a relatively untrained American actor, to be able to mouth those words, to speak those long sentences and speeches one after another. Yet, it can be done. Technically it can be achieved. And when it is, it's an extraordinary effect. But actors, having to go through the experience of putting something on a stage, have to make the event convincing. That there's a level of credibility that the writer has to have emotionally—on whatever level. The writing has to have that, or the actor can't really perform it convincingly.

  Hatcher: Is that the “emotional build” actors talk about? I've heard actors say, “Well, I can get to where you want me to go in a script, but I'll have to make quite a jump. It might help if you give me dialogue that gets me between A and Z.”

  Blessing: That can often be a very helpful exchange with actors. I've had actors say to me, “This is nice, I love where it's getting to, but what if something like this happened between A and Z.” And I've often worked to rewrite scripts or scenes on that basis. I've also had the direct opposite experience, of an actor being so unhelpful as to tell a director in my presence, “Well, I can only do the scene one of two ways” in order to get a change they want but which I think is wrong or unnecessary. Or they'll do the opposite, as a defense mechanism, to stop me from changing anything in the script.

  Hatcher: Let's talk about theatricality. You'll hear someone talk about theatricality and you think they mean actors dressed as puppets running around on stage saying, “Look at this blanket, it's really a cloud.” But some of your plays take place in rooms that look like rooms and feel like rooms—and others take on a different kind of reality. Two Rooms is an example. Fortinbras is an example too. Could you talk a little bit about how you move from one kind of theatrical depiction to another?

  Blessing: I love sets. I'm always fascinated by what set is ultimately chosen for a play or suggested to people by a script. I try not to spend a great deal of time thinking about the set when I'm writing it other than to get the most fundamental ground rules set up. In Two Rooms I wanted one room, one space. I wanted it to be empty. There were still lots of choices to be made by the set designers. Marjorie Kellogg designed the first product
ion at the La Jolla Playhouse and did a magnificent job with minimals, you know. The choices she made were texture and color and some other choices which were just wonderful and did a tremendous amount for the play.

  Hatcher: And the idea in the play, just so everybody knows, is that you're primarily in two rooms, one in the United States and one in Lebanon.

  Blessing: It's his office in his Washington home which is stripped of all furniture. And the other one is the empty room where he's being held in Beirut.

  Hatcher: But at any given time the characters are in the same space onstage, but we understand that they are in totally different places.

  Blessing: They are in one place or the other, and then of course imaginatively the characters bleed from one place to the other.

  Hatcher: Now that kind of theatrical idea is one that comes up when you're writing the play. Do you remember the first time you came up with an idea that was that theatrical—or was your very first play like that?

  Blessing: Yes, it's interesting—because Two Rooms was not a play that I could have started to write without knowing that about the set. So that was a set decision that came very, very early, whereas Fortinbras—I said to myself, “I know it's in Elsinore. That much I know, but where in Elsinore, what the sets are …”—that slowly developed as I started the scenes and decided where, and then the play was sort of telling me where it wanted to go next. Some of my earlier plays were set in more realistic situations that were very specific. In Independence it started out as a play about three sisters, and it happened in one small town in Iowa, in an apartment one of them had. And then in later drafts their mother kept calling, and finally she became so important on the phone that I introduced her into the play—and, before I knew it, they were all at her house in a different Iowa town so the set shifted as the story shifted and settled in Independence, Iowa.