From shady dealings to the spotlight

When most people go to a model search, they hope to get discovered, not do the discovering…. When most people go to a model search, they hope to get discovered, not do the discovering.

When Ben Blazer, star of Pitt Rep’s “A Lie of the Mind,” took his younger brother to the Model Search America competition, he discovered acting.

“It was a massive audition, and they liked both of us,” Blazer said with a shrug. The movement was supposed to indicate modesty, but he doesn’t quite make it. As he flashes a smile, his self-confidence is palpable, as is the energy he exudes as he continues: “During the screen test I felt really at home and I thought, ‘Wow! This is strangely comfortable.'”

It was not until he went to New York and sat in on a friend’s play rehearsal that he decided to look into some formal training. He enrolled in an acting for television class at the Community College of Allegheny County (CCAC). But at this point in his life, acting was just his side job.

“I was selling drugs at the time,” Blazer said matter-of-factly. When asked if he was comfortable with having this information in print, he jokingly replied, “Sure. It’s a matter of public record anyway.”

It’s hard to imagine the clean-cut man sitting across from me, with his black turtleneck, button-down gold shirt and easy smile, living outside the law. “I’m very upfront about it,” he said. “People usually don’t believe it when I tell them. When they find out later, they feel betrayed or hurt, so I just put it out there.”

At CCAC, he found himself swept up in the world of college theater.

“I liked the environment,” he said with a touch of excitement, describing his first experiences. “It was a different kind of people and they thought about philosophical things. I auditioned for everything. They were doing ‘The Crucible’ and I thought, ‘I can be a villager and I can stand in the back.'”

The newcomer found himself cast as John Proctor, the play’s main character. Pleased and surprised as he was, he didn’t think he was up to the challenge of the lead role.

“I went to the director and I said ‘Listen,'” Blazer recounts almost conspiratorially, “‘I can’t do it. I smoke pot; I can’t memorize lines.’ I mean at this point I carried a gun to school everyday.”

In the end, Blazer took the role and began rehearsals. Then, on the night before the show was slated to open, he fell into a police setup and was arrested. He was looking at three to six as a minimum state sentence, but forfeited everything for a reduced sentence. With the help of his mother and priest, he avoided jail time.

“An alternative was a work-release program in a halfway house,” he explained. “There was a bed waiting for me the day I went to sentencing. But I’ll never forget what the judge said to me because it rhymed: ‘Ben. If I see you again, Western Pen.'”

His program only allowed him to be away from the center for 48 hours a week, but as a college student, he was able to negotiate longer amounts of time. As such, he became as involved as possible in order to get as much time away as he could. He took classes, landed a part in a play, became drama president and student government board vice-president.

“It’s the best thing that could have happened,” he said. “I don’t want to do the ‘acting saved my life’ bit, but it was a constant. It was something I enjoyed and I knew I had something intangible. It was something I could do, even if I didn’t always know how I got there.” Smiling, and with a slight glint in his eye he added, “I also realized that with a felony record, the one field where it doesn’t apply is entertainment.”

Blazer’s current involvement is with Pitt Rep’s production of “A Lie of the Mind” by Sam Shepard. He plays Jake, the unstable lead character in a play about obsessive love and its destructive consequences.

“It’s such a crazy show that I feel like the word realism doesn’t apply,” Blazer said when describing the production. “If you could walk down the street with goggles and see what was really going on inside people’s homes, that’s what this show is. These people [the characters] are really warped.”

Blazer has been able to draw on much of his past experience to reach the dark places Jake must go. Jake, for example, has brutally beaten his wife Beth to the point of death.

“The play is about addictive love and yeah, my past helps,” he said with a nod. “I’ve had problems, I’ve been in jail. I was kind of worried about tapping into that, about regressing. I’m not always able to leave his [Jake’s] stuff at the rehearsal hall.”

For Blazer, this show has stretched him as an actor and allowed him to work with director Melanie Dreyer. He’d been hoping to work with her for the last three years.

“Part of it was a validation thing,” Blazer said, and for the first time there seems to be a hint of vulnerability in his voice. “Part of it was a diversified experience. This show is a culmination for me from Jack [his first role with Pitt Rep in “Everything in the Garden”] to Jake. I’m feeling a little crazy,” he said reflectively. Leaning in, as if divulging a secret, he asked, “You have to be crazy to be an actor, don’t you?”

Crazy or not, Blazer has worked hard to get where he is today. Graduating in April, he is in the process of applying to graduate schools to earn his acting MFA. He will be auditioning through URTA, the University/Resident Theatre Association, which allows many schools to see him at once in an intensive four-day process. He has his sights set on such schools as Brown and Yale. While he knows how competitive it is, he has a slight advantage over those that followed the four-year college plan after high school.

“You know, I’m 27,” he said. “And that used to kind of bother me, but I actually think it helped me get roles. Now I’m sure it will help me make the transition to grad school. They want mature actors.”

Blazer’s vibrant personality and easy charm is sure to make an impression on any director he meets. With such focused drive and confidence, it seems we’ll be seeing his name again sometime soon.

“A Lie of the Mind” is running through Dec. 11 in the Henry Heymann Theatre.