'American Blues' by Evan Guilford-Blake
American Blues was developed at Chicago Dramatists, and at Chicago’s Raven Theatre and Victory Gardens Theatre, over the course of several months, primarily with a group of actors I invited to participate in the process. I wrote it for two reasons: First, I’d recently written a 38-minute one-act entitled Tio’s Blues in a workshop at Dramatists, and I wanted to create a companion piece that could use the same cast, to make a full evening of thematically related work. Second, one of my favorite plays is The Glass Menagerie. I was curious about the possibility of resetting Amanda and Laura into another era. Naurean of American Blues is my riff on an Amanda Wingfield of 1962, and Naurean’s daughter Amanda is both a homage to that Tennessee Williams’ character and a reconception of Laura in The Glass Menagerie.
But I wanted to do more than contemporize Menagerie. I wanted to create a conflict between two diametrically opposite worlds. Thus, I turned for inspiration to a playwright whose characters and style are about as unlike Williams’ as you can get: David Mamet. Trumpy and LadyBlue are my perceptions of people Mamet might have written, and their interaction with Naurean and Amanda is, I hope, what might happen if these two worlds collided.
The play is about truth and illusion, about dreams and dreams gone awry. With the opportunity to discuss this with a wonderful cast during the play’s development, I was able to use their insights to point up the dialogue, and “theatricalise” the play using Naurean’s imagination as a setting.
Collectively, American Blues and Tio’s Blues are called Mid-Century Blues. The individual plays have each won three awards. Neither the full evening nor either of the component works has been fully produced to date, but Tio’s Blues will premiere at the University of New Orleans in February. That production will be remounted at the 2010 New Orleans Literary/Tennessee Williams Festival in March, as the winner of the festival’s 2009 one-act play competition.
Evan Guilford-Blake is the author of about 35 produced plays which have received more than 120 productions across the U.S., in Canada, Australia, the UK and Israel. He has won 31 playwriting competitions (among them: Ireland's Eamon Keane Award for An Uncommon Language; the Jackie White Memorial and the Aurand Harris/New England Theatre Conference for Telling William Tell, a play for young audiences, published by TYA Scripts; the Texas Nonprofit Theatres and Saints and Sinners competitions for Nighthawks [neoNuma Arts]; and the Utah PlayFest for Ceremonies of Prayer [Heartland Plays]). Playscripts publishes The Firebird and True Magic; Tales from Beatrix Potter is forthcoming from Eldridge, and JAC Publishing will issue four of his plays during 2010.
He has also won numerous awards for his short stories as well as his poetry and children's material. Evan has stories in recent anthologies from Adams Media and Outrider Press and short fiction on the web .
He is Resident Playwright emeritus at Chicago Dramatists (where he also serves on the advisory board, and where most of his work has been developed) and a member of the Dramatists Guild. He has served as an Instructor and Playwright-in-Residence at Utah State University and a responder and presenter for the American College Theatre Festival. He created the seminar "The Business of Playwriting: Developing and Marketing Your Play Without an Agent," which he has presented across the U.S. In 2008, he was selected for the Georgia Writers Registry and nominated for Southern Artistry.
He and his wife (and inspiration), freelance writer and jewelry designer Roxanna Guilford-Blake, live in the Atlanta area with their two lovable, dumb-as-dirt doves, Quill and Gabriella.
