4x4 Four Minutes, Four Questions Lee Blessing & Mark Brown

The best-known names at this year's Arkansas New Play Festival came to play writing in very different ways.

Lee Blessing, best known as the author of "A Walk in the Woods," earned a master of fine arts in poetry.

Mark Brown, best known for "Around the World in 80 Days," was an actor until he started writing in his 40s.

Both will introduce new works to Northwest Arkansas audiences this weekend: Blessing's "Uncle," presented as a script-in-hand reading, is described as "a comedy about an academic sabbatical gone terribly awry." Brown's "The Quest for Don Quixote" will be fully staged.

Both playwrights agreed to answer four questions for What's Up!

Q: What inspired this play?

BROWN: It started out as an adaptation, but it wasn't until I recovered from a drastic decline in my health when I made it my own. As long as I can remember I've suffered from anxiety and depression and have been treated for it for years. At about the same time I started adapting the book, my health got worse, and I didn't know what was going on. It was a terrible time for me. My publisher turned down the script, my father passed away, and I tried to kill myself -- the perfect ingredients for a comedy. Eventually I was diagnosed with bipolar 2, and once we started treating it, I was able to climb out of the abyss. All of that inspired me to take the script in a different direction from a straight adaptation.

BLESSING: I suppose Anton Chekhov's life inspired "Uncle." At least his work did. Culturally we've internalized a Chekhovian "universe" (just as we have a Shakespearean universe) which has come to mean a great deal to us. This play gives me a chance to tease out what we enjoy about that world and how we relate it to the world we think of as real. So this is a play inspired not so much by life but by art -- which is, let's face it, another kind of life.

Q: Is there a predictable path between an idea and a play for you? Or does it vary from project to project?

BLESSING: It has always varied enormously. The strongest common characteristic of my plays is that they have little in common. My emphasis has always been to write good plays, not a specific kind of play. Unfortunately, the marketplace tends to prefer playwrights who do the latter, whether a particular play of theirs is good or not. So my inspirations come from all directions and in all ways: farces, comedies, work plays, family plays, political plays, sports plays, trial plays, love stories, experimental plays, updates of classic works -- what have you.

Q: How does a workshop setting like the Arkansas New Play Festival help you? Do you create your own workshop with colleagues if one is not readily available?

BROWN: I love workshop settings. I need to see my scripts on their feet. There's something about actors moving around that inspires me. I tend to write theatrical scripts, scripts that celebrate being in a theater, so I like to see what's possible. I don't create workshops, per se. But I do have friends come over to do readings. I bribe them with food.

BLESSING: One easily grows "deaf" to one's own work as one writes. It's crucial to sit in a room with others who are hearing it for the first time. That's how you regain the ability to hear it.

Q: Does this play have a "moral" or a "takeaway" that differs from the original? Was it part of your early interest in the play?

BLESSING: It's human nature (especially as ticket prices rise) to want some nugget of meaning to put in one's mental pocket at the end of a performance and carry home to family and friends. But good playwrights hope to be doing something larger than that. In the best plays, the playwright's particular style or "voice" is also tremendously important. Transcendent drama is not about the moral you take home. It's about the process of discovery you make in your own visceral response to what you see and hear as you experience it.

-- Becca Martin-Brown

bmartin@nwadg.com

NAN What's Up on 06/19/2015