The following articles appeared in Actors Theatre's subscriber newsletter prior to the 1991 Humana Festival

DOWN THE JOURNALISTIC ROAD
Considering the extensive amount of available material about serial killers, there is very little information concerning the writers who document the stories. In Down the Road, Lee Blessing examines the relationship between a husband and wife team and the serial killer who is the subject of their next book. Although Blessing’s characters are fictitious, there is legitimacy in posing questions about the degree to which journalists, and the public, are susceptible to being manipulated by a serial killer.

Rather than focusing solely on the atrocious crimes committed by this killer, the play also raises issues about the ethics of journalism and the possible motivation behind documenting horrifying events for mass consumption. There seems to be a fine line between illuminating this menace to society and exploiting the culprits by transforming them into celebrities.

Apparently, people do make successful careers out of the crime story genre. Ted Bundy alone has been the subject of five books and a network mini-series. You can walk into almost any bookstore and find a whole section devoted to crime. Ann Rule, an ex-policewoman and freelance writer, is a best-selling author of several non-fiction crime stories. In The Stranger Beside Me, one of the books dedicated to the life of Ted Bundy, Rule asserts, "Ted Bundy was a macabre kind of folk hero—or anti-hero. It may have been that his crimes were so heinous that no one could bear to stop and reflect on their reality."

Does her theory explain America’s fascination with this tragic phenomenon? Perhaps, but which comes first, the public need for information about this dark reality or the controversial subject which lends itself to sensationalism? Certainly, we cannot ignore the benefits reaped by the participants, whether it’s the satisfaction of the public’s morbid curiosity, the monetary gain of the writers, or the acquisition of celebrity status by the killers themselves.

After the television mini-series about Ted Bundy, starring Mark Harmon, a new generation of teenage girls fell in love with Bundy. "Harmon’s portrayal of Ted was so charming and sexy that he sometimes seemed heroic," says Rule. According to Rule, after the televised program, Bundy received numerous calls and letters from young girls who wanted to go on a pilgrimage to Florida to "save Ted Bundy." This seems to suggest an inability to discriminate between fact and fiction which coincides with Rule’s previous assertion about the difficulty in facing the brutal reality.

The most disturbing detail of this warped American obsession is the lack of attention paid to the victims of the crimes. With the exception of a few organizations advocating victims’ rights, there is little restitution for them.

Down the Road avoids sensationalism by giving equal importance to the exploration of the deranged mind of the killer and to the dilemma in which the journalists are involved. This play is not exclusively about the life of a serial killer. It deals with the danger of becoming so emotionally involved with him that the journalist minimizes, or entirely forgets, the horror within his crimes. Blessing offers us a challenging and provocative perspective on an otherwise overly indulged subject.

— Emily F. Morse