Ed Asner coming to Winnipesaukee Playhouse

LACONIA — He has played a gruff newspaper editor, a conflicted slave boat captain and a depressed baker.

Now, Ed Asner, a seven-time Emmy winner, is in a one-man comedic play, “A Man and His Prostate,” which will be presented at the Winnipesaukee Playhouse Oct. 5-6.

The play follows an Italian vacation disrupted by a medical emergency. Ed Weinberger, an award-winning writer and producer, based the play on his own experience and approached Asner with the project.

“He sought me out like a bloodhound,” Asner said in an interview. “It’s his experience, so it has veracity. It’s a beautiful show.”

Asner, 88, has performed the show across the country over the last couple years.

He has enjoyed a long career and had the kind of success few actors will ever see, but he has no interest in slowing down. 

“I have no other purpose,” he said.

And, he finds it rewarding to bring awareness to medical issues that are survivable if caught early.

“A man dies of prostate cancer every 16 minutes,” he said. “The death toll is staggering. Men don’t like to go to a doctor. They don’t want to admit failure, as if it were a failure. We’re just a stubborn breed.”

He likes being in a production that carries an important message.

In the dramatic television series, “Lou Grant,” Asner played a hard-charging city editor on a Los Angeles newspaper whose reporters develop stories on important issues of the day such as homelessness, gangs, even urban renewal.

People still tell Asner they chose journalism as a career because of “Lou Grant.”

“It showed the beauty and the majesty of the press,” he said. “It might not have shown enough of the dark side of the press. Leave that to Donald Trump.”

Asner is no fan of Trump or Republican politics. He laments U.S. involvement in the war in Iraq and said the press didn’t do enough to question the rationale for getting into that war.

He said many of today’s dramatic offerings fail to carry important messages.

“I don't think the achievement in film is as great singularly as it was when I was in the midst of it all,” he said. “There's more being made but less being said. It's hard to create product and that will have widespread appeal and still be meaningful.”

Before “Lou Grant,” Asner played a television station executive in the “Mary Tyler Moore Show.”

He played the religious and morally conflicted Capt. Thomas Davies of the Lord Ligonier slave ship in the award-winning miniseries, “Roots.”

In another miniseries, “Rich Man, Poor Man,” he played Axel Jordache, a German-American baker who falls into suicidal depression.

It is unusual to get an actor of his caliber in a small venue, so unusual that Winnipesaukee Playhouse founder Neil Pankhurst didn’t take it seriously at first when he received an email from Asner’s daughter, Liza, expressing interest in staging the play there.

“Because of who he is and because we’re in the middle of Meredith, New Hampshire, in a theater with less than 200 seats, I assumed it was a mistake,” Pankhurst said. “I ignored it for a while and then sort of became intrigued.

“I figured there was no harm in asking because it would be great to have him come here. I emailed back and had a very positive response.

“Ed Asner, by far, will be the most famous performer ever on our stage.”

The shows have sold out.