Twenty-five years have passed since Lee Blessing made his mark on Broadway with “A Walk in the Woods”. A two-handed drama about an American and Russian arms negotiator taking some off-the-clock time to talk less formally about the most pressing issues of the day, the play was a Tony, Olivier and Pulitzer Prize nominee and remains Blessing’s best-known work. However, Blessing had already written half a dozen plays before that one, and more than two dozen since then. Those include everything from “Fortinbras”, his adaptation of “Hamlet”; “Eleemosynary”, about mothers and daughters; the baseball bio-play “Cobb”, “Two Rooms”, about the effects of Arab terrorism on the homefront, and “Down the Road”, about the effects of unfathomable evil on a married couple.

His latest finds him in both a mordant and playful mood – simultaneously – since he’s taking on the legacy of perhaps the most destructive con artist in American history, Bernard Madoff. Speculating on the motives of the disgraced Ponzi schemer, as well the actions that led to Madoff’s imprisonment, the suicide of a client and the suicide of his own son, Blessing has cooked up “A User’s Guide to Hell, Featuring Bernie Madoff”, which, courtesy of the Project Y Theater Company, has its world premiere Sept. 7 and plays through Sept. 28 at the Atlantic Theater’s Stage II space on West 16th Street.

Blessing was kind enough to appear on my weekly radio program, “Dave’s Gone By”, to discuss “User’s Guide” as well as his other plays and general life as a writer. To hear the full interview as a stream or download, please visit the archives section at www.davesgoneby.com for the full episode that aired Sat, Sept. 7, or click here for just the interview: https://www.totaltheater.com/?q=node/5556.

Here are some highlights of our chat:

DAVE LEFKOWITZ: Is the play the title?
LEE BLESSING: It IS the title. It’s a chance for us to get out for an evening and go to hell and see what it is composed of, using a visit by what most people assume is potentially likely – by Bernard Madoff. When one wants to explore hell, and you need to send somebody there, you have to come up with a personage that we generally think, if there is a hell, he’s probably going…
Like Dante, he finds himself in hell. He didn’t expect to be there; he didn’t think there was one. But lo and behold, there is. He’s not the guy who experiences it, but just as Dante had Virgil, oddly enough, Bernie stumbles into someone named “Verge” who performs that function…
[Madoff] does meet one or two well-known evil people, he also meets some lesser-known evil people who nevertheless have done evil things or been the victims of evil things, suicide. He meets the sorts of spirits you might find in hell, permanently or briefly.
DL: Wait, are you saying that people who commit suicide…that’s where they go?
BLESSING: It’s Catholic dogma that people who commit suicide go to hell, or don’t go to heaven at the very least. The irony, of course, is that Bernie, who is Jewish, doesn’t expect there to be a hell at all. But when he does get there, for some reason, whether we’re in a literal hell or a hell of his imagination, it seems to be modeled more on Dante’s vision of hell, the Catholic version of hell, than anything else. Which, of course, has been the dominant image of hell that Western civilization has held since the 14th Century…
One of the points of the play is that it’s almost impossible for us in any believable way to conceive either heaven or hell or whatever might be waiting after the point of death.
DL: Hey, I can conceive hell: it’s the Department of Motor Vehicles.
BLESSING: (laughs) Yes, exactly.

DL: The set design of the show for Project Y Theater Company, is it flames, red-velvet curtains…?
BLESSING: Fortunately for the play, it’s a highly abstract set with a lot of moving panels. Nothing terribly literal. Like a typical carnival or side-show illustration of hell that you might find at the state fair… One of the nice things about trying to set a play in hell is that you open up the scenic possibilities. It can be anything we conceive.

DL: Obvious question, but what gave you the idea that there’s a play in the Bernie Madoff thing? What was the genesis?
BLESSING: Bernard Madoff was a very large story, in part because of how much money was in that Ponzi scheme. I think the estimates were 65 billion dollars, at the highest. That’s a tremendous amount of money. And a lot of the people who were taken in that Ponzi scheme were very well-known and very wealthy people.
DL: The New York Mets almost folded because of it.
BLESSING: It was also Bernie’s style, which was always pretend you didn’t want to let people in, and then finally, after they begged enough, taking their money. The fact that he was Jewish and preyed as much upon other Jews as anybody else. So I think there was a sense of real betrayal in New York. And, of course, he’d risen very high in the ranks of Wall Street money types and held various positions and been widely trusted by all sorts of people… He was hurting big fish and little fish equally. He seemed to have no sense of conscience about it whatsoever.

DL: If there ever is a defense for what he did, I imagine it’s that he thought he could spin the wheel forever. He always thought he could borrow from Peter to pay Paul.
BLESSING: They always tend to live in denial, or believe that will go on much longer than it typically does.
DL: They don’t think they’re gonna hurt anybody ultimately, so long as they keep getting away with it. The person who invests half a million dollars, and then says, “Where’s my money?”, and then [Madoff] goes and borrows and gives them back 600 thou, he probably thinks in his mind, “They win, I win.”
BLESSING: Going into a Ponzi scheme, there’s a bit of assurance, if it goes well, that the people you meet in the first third or so of the time you’re running the scheme will make their money back or, in fact, make money. But the longer it goes, the worse it gets for everybody involved.
I think the thing that made me interested in writing about Bernard Madoff and this particular scandal was that people were so shaken by it. They were so angry. They were so upset, and at least one person killed himself. And then later, of course, his own son killed himself. Just tremendous passions worked up by this.
But I was struck by a random comment that I heard reported on the news. Somebody said: “This is the worst crime ever committed in America.” And I thought, “Wow, that’s disputable!” (laughs) I can understand why a person would feel that passionately, and yet it just didn’t make any sense. So it started making me wonder about other crimes, the nature of crime and the nature of punishment, and how we think about the afterlife as some sort of way to get back at people who do terrible things and aren’t punished in life. The essential childishness of that need we have emotionally to get us through our own days. How hell functions in our own emotional life was, to me, an interesting thing.

DL: I assume it’s a satirical comedy...?
BLESSING: Somebody’s already called it a black, black comedy. (laughs)
DL: Fine, but the playwright on some level has to love the bad guy in order to write it. So the actor who’s playing him can also love that character. Were you able to find a nook that makes [Madoff] fascinating and in some ways likeable, or even lovable? Even though he did a monstrous thing?
BLESSING: Well, I wouldn’t wanna hug him the way I’d like to hug Barney!
DL: Oh, I woudn’t wanna hug Barney. Ew!
BLESSING: Barney’s kinda scary, too.
DL: Maybe Chica, the chicken on Sprouts. Her I’d hug.
BLESSING: The minute you try to write a character three dimensionally, you’re seeing his faults, but you’re also – by the very nature of the process – you’re seeing who they are, how they worked, what they thought of themselves, what the process of events in their lives were, the positions they might have been in, and how it might have come to be. If you’re playing Jack the Ripper, you need to be able to find some sort of emotional and psychological justification for who you are and how you do things.

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DL: In general, how much pre-work do you do, and where you are when you first start [actually writing]?
BLESSING: When I was getting my MFA in playwriting, my mentor was always sitting there saying, “You know, you really should know the climax of the play before you begin writing it.” While I always agree with that in theory, I’ve never been able to do it. So typically, I’ll start writing towards an end, towards a direction that I think will provide an effective climax. Very often, somewhere in the writing of the play, somewhere in the middle of what I’m doing, I realize, “Oh yes, that’s where it should go, that’s the direction that will make it the most effective.” That happened in this play, as well. I didn’t absolutely know what the culmination of the play was going to be before I was well into it.

DL: Do you do an outline?
BLESSING: No, I don’t do an outline. I usually think through a play at least up to a point. I do a lot of thinking about a play, often for years, before I’ll start writing it. So in a sense, I’ve lived with the play. But in terms of the specific plot, often that will reveal itself to me while I’m writing. It’s something you can get away with in playwriting because there’s never much of a deadline (laughs). With other dramatic forms, it’s much harder to do it that way.

DL: How did the Project Y production come about?
BLESSING: I have certainly done lots of plays on commission; I’m doing one right now… But this one started completely on spec. I sent it around a couple of places. Among the people who read it were the people at Project Y. I’d known a number of them for a long time because I taught graduate playwriting for a dozen years at Rutgers University, and a couple of them had gone through the program. So when they came to me, I thought, “well, this is a plucky young group of people I already know are talented because I saw them work their way through grad school. And I thought, “This might be a very nice way to do the play.” Then I discovered they wanted to do it in the perfect location; they’re doing it in the second space of the Atlantic Theater in Chelsea. The great thing about that theater is that you walk in off the street, go directly into an elevator and go down two floors.
DL: So it feels like you’re descending?
BLESSING: (laughs) It’s like a site-specific venue for this play.

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DL: Did “A Walk in the Woods” feel different from your other pieces? Was there a reason that became your calling card?
BLESSING: There were some odd things about it. For example, it was on Broadway, but it was the first play I ever had produced in New York. Which is a very odd thing; one does not normally start at the top in terms of production. That alone made it highly unusual. The play worked then, and it’s always worked. It’s a strong, two-character play written in the 80s about nuclear arms negotiation. There was a lot of fear people had…when both the United States and the Soviet Union were rattling sabers a good deal. People were very nervous about all these nuclear arms that were poised and pointed at each other’s countries. But it’s interesting to me that the play continues to be done all the time. I think that’s because the problem is chronic: you invent a weapon, you can’t un-invent it. While we do seek to control the proliferation of nuclear weapons, we’re not very successful at that. Frankly, some of the struggles, and the entente, the nuclear stand-off, are still going on – say, between Pakistan and India. One never knows when someone will make a grievous error there. The problem is still around.
I have another play, “Two Rooms”, also written in the 80s, in the time when Westerners were being kidnapped in Lebanon. It’s about the struggles that people went through when the Reagan administration chose not to negotiate with kidnappers. So Europeans would be released, but Americans weren’t; Terry Anderson was held for five years. What I noticed was that after 9/11, that play started being done again a great deal... People will go and see that play even though it’s about issues of the 1980s, and they’ll simply do all the plug-ins for what’s going on now.

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DL: It seems that for you, Broadway has never been the brass ring. It’s more about getting the plays done?
BLESSING: As my dad used to say, I’ve never been that money oriented. I think if you’re trying to make a real living as a playwright, only a few people ever get to. Those are the people who typically get identified with being, as we like to call it, “a Broadway playwright.” But that is fast disappearing, and theater itself has changed so much. You don’t see new people getting that pattern going very much any longer. It’s rarer and rarer to see somebody really make a significant living in theater as a playwright.
DL: So if you hadn’t been running the theater program at Rutgers, you would not really be getting by?
BLESSING: Well, I’d be getting by if I lived in a hollow log in Maine! (laughs) I think every playwright tends to find their way to make it. You find a high percentage of people in theater – especially playwrights – who come from families with some wealth. In a sense they’re free to be playwrights; they don’t really need to make a lot of money. This dream of being a working-class kid who, because he or she is a very talented playwright, and then getting somewhere – that’s becoming rarer and rarer. Not that it was ever very common.
I’m trying to remember the name of that movie – the Jack Nicholson/Diane Keaton movie [“Something’s Gotta Give”] that takes place out in the Hamptons. He has heart trouble, and they get together, she dates Keanu Reaves for awhile and then ends up with Jack. It’s all very believable… But my favorite part is that she’s a playwright. In this Hampton’s mansion five feet from the water. And I’m thinking, “Yeah, yeah. Let’s not go into how she earned all that money from playwriting.” I guarantee, even Nora Ephron was not making much money from her plays! She made her money in other forms. You don’t make a great deal of money being a playwright.

DL: But I’m surprised that when “A Walk in the Woods” made your name, you didn’t jump to the West Coast?
BLESSING: I was in the Twin Cities with a wife and family for most of those years, and it was pretty awkward to try and relocate. I did come out and do a little work in L.A., that was all well and good, but my emphasis has always been writing plays. Sadly, I think for the last 20-25 years, the pattern has been to get yourself a play that’s noted and written about in a successful (hopefully) New York production – in whatever level: Broadway, major off-Broadway, second-tier off-Broadway, but enough to get you noticed and get you that agent if you don’t already have one – and then use that as a stepping stone to get your ass out to L.A. and start working in TV. Really, what’s happened in the last 10-15 years is that the writing on the best cable series has become the central dramatic experience that Americans are undergoing these days. We don’t automatically think of going to Broadway or off-Broadway to see the next important piece of American dramatic writing. We’re as likely to go look at “Breaking Bad” on AMC or “Boardwalk Empire” on HBO. So many talented playwrights get a hit play and get out of the theater.
DL: But you’re currently married to a fellow playwright and someone who does more TV writing than you do: Melanie Marnich. What’s it like being married to another playwright?
BLESSING: I’m sure just as with actor marriages, sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t work at all. In our case, I think it’s worked extremely well. I’m very fortunate. Melanie and I got married seven years ago. It’s my second marriage and her first. When we started dating, we started reading each other’s plays more. Because we knew we couldn’t have a serious relationship with a writer whose work we didn’t respect. So we had to get that out of the way. Luckily, I love her writing and she seems to be able to bear mine.
After that difficult point was passed, most of the rest of it has been easy. We don’t write together, and we don’t have any ambition to write together. It would be fine if we did – or didn’t – but it’s important that it’s well defined. And she has come out here since 2007 and done great, great work working on series at HBO, Showtime and AMC. She has a real flair for working in media.
DL: Is she the first one who sees your work, and vice versa?
BLESSING: We do read each other’s work. And it’s been very comfortable in recent years because the mass of what she’s done has been television, while I’ve been doing theater. So we’re not really competing for the same production opportunities. We enjoy each other’s writing, so it’s actually been a pretty pleasurable step.

DL: What about writing routines? What’s your routine, and does it differ from your wife’s?
BLESSING: Our routines differ completely. She is an extremely disciplined and organized writer, probably because she spent nine years as an advertising copywriter. She’s up very early in the morning and will work throughout the morning and a little bit in the afternoon. Whereas I just never know when I’m gonna write again! I get to it eventually, and when I do, I write rather intensely, but it can take awhile for me to get to that point where I know what I’m going to do. I don’t sit down unless I really know what I’m doing.