THE PLAY

American Theatre Wing
Downstage Center Interview Program at American Theatre Wing
Excerpt from an Interview with Lee Blessing

How did you come to write Going to St. Ives?

LB: Really the way it began, oddly enough I had a show at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center years ago, a play called A Walk in the Woods, a play that later played on Broadway and it had a man who was in his 50s and another man who was slightly younger and they were an American and a Soviet negotiator. It went very well obviously. But while I was up there there were two actresses who said one day (and they were about the same age as these actors), “You should write a play like that for women sometime.” So, I said “I’m going to get right on that”. Ten years later I started this play. [Laughter] What was interesting was in trying to write another play that was [for] two people that dealt geopolitical issues, but you know, these were woman. I sort of took a different tack and I did not allow them to be people who were in government for example as the men in Walk in the Woods are. The one is the mother of the leader of a country and a rather monstrous leader at that. The other one doesn’t want anything to do with politics at all. So it instantly became a very different kind of play and the themes in it became very different. In the case of both women there’s a big issue about their sons – life and death issues about their sons. So it quickly became a play very much about motherhood. About . . .what it is to be a mother, what it is to lose a son or at least contemplate losing a son. And, that became a large part of the play. And, also the play is a murder suspense story and that differentiated it a great deal from Walk in the Woods.

Excerpt from A CurtainUp Review

Some artists are settlers. Whether painters or playwrights, once they find a style to which the public responds, they settle in and work within that comfort zone. Other artists are lifelong explorers, not content to keep mining familiar territory to insure success. Lee Blessing falls into this latter category. While you might say he’s stuck to a writing formula in the sense of using a small canvas for stories that revolve around big ideas, he keeps trying out new styles and taking on previously unexamined themes. Consequently, audiences and critics are likely to be all over the map in their response to his plays.

The Blessing play that has garnered the most unanimous praises was of course his 1988 Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-nominated A Walk in the Woods.