By Chris Worthy
“I had a tough medical five years.”
Erik Jensen and Jessica Blank are artists – multihyphenates who create and write and act to inform and entertain. Their resumes are filled with projects of the sort that solidify who they are, reflecting the dignity and humanity of people who too often don’t have their voices heard.
Jensen and Blank are married and the parents of a daughter. They have an impressive list of credits as writers and actors – you’ve probably seen Jensen in “The Walking Dead” or “Mindhunter” – Blank is a novelist and both are playwrights. They are immensely creative individually, and together, and they are a force for good.
And Jensen collected comic books as a kid, which turned out to be even more meaningful than 12-year-old Erik could have imagined.
To say they’ve had some stuff on their plate these last few years would be a gross understatement.
“I survived a brain aneurysm, which is crazy,” Jensen said. “Fifty percent of the people who have the type of aneurysm that I had die instantly – and of the 50% that survive, 80% have permanent cognitive and physical problems. And I didn’t. None of that happened. I got very lucky, and Jessica was there for the whole thing. It was really worse for her because I was asleep, but she saved my life, as she has quite a few times.”
The show did go on
“He had the aneurysm while we were in rehearsal for the remount of our play, ‘Coal Country,’ and I was directing,” Blank said.
Brain surgery, ICU, rehearsals – it all ran together, with Blank going back and forth between the hospital and the theater.
“The play is a documentary play based on the interviews we did with surviving family members of a coal mine disaster in southern West Virginia, and 29 men were killed,” Blank said. “Audible, who was co-producing the play, made the incredibly generous gesture of inviting all 29 families to New York and traveling anybody from those families who wanted to go to New York to see the play.
So, three weeks after Erik got out of the hospital, the play was up and running, and that was set to happen. Families showed up in New York City. They had made the journey from West Virginia. We were an off-Broadway production without understudies, as is the case for most off-Broadway productions.”
And then a cast member came down with Covid. The performance for families would have to be canceled without someone to step in.
Cue Jensen, just weeks after a medical event that might have ended his life.
“We canceled the performance the night before so that the cast could rehearse Erik in on the role,” Blank said. “He learned all the blocking, all the choreography that he had only ever seen from the outside, and went on stage that weekend for the families, three weeks after he got out of the hospital.”
That, in a nutshell, is what Jensen and Blank are all about. The show must go on indeed, but it goes on because the story matters. Their story matters.
“Our artistic life has all been about service in some form or another, whenever we figure out a way to do that,” Jensen said.
A love story rooted in justice
Blank and Jensen fell in love doing what they do best. More than 25 years ago, they began work for what would become “The Exonerated,” their play about the stories of people who had been exonerated years after being sentenced to death for crimes they did not commit.
“Somebody entrusting you with the story, and carrying that story is an honor,” Jensen said. “It’s a privilege and something that should not be taken lightly. But what was amazing about these stories is they weren’t the way they’re presented to us in a lot of true crime stories – it’s always very dark, very thriller. The stories that we were collecting were filled with humanity, loss, fear, humor. You know, people are three dimensional, whether they’re wrongly convicted and sitting on death row or whether they’re going to work every day.”
“The Exonerated” made a tangible life-saving difference. Part of it was performed for Gov. George Ryan of Illinois as he was considering whether to commute the sentences of the state’s death row inmates before leaving office. Blank said Ryan recounted the experience in his book.
“He was really wrestling with the decision, but the night that he saw the show, he said that was a turning point for him, and after that, he never looked back,” she said. “What that showed us is that storytelling actually has the power in the right circumstances to create real change and to do real good in the world – whether that’s a small audience, whether it’s a large audience and you’re changing world views, whether it’s an audience of one who is in a position to make an enormously impactful decision. We probably both have personal reasons why we were already both interested in that when we met each other. But I think through that experience, we both saw that it’s a thing that you can do. And once you know that’s a thing that you can do, how beautiful is that? Why would we not want to use our craft to make the world a more beautiful place, a just place, in whatever ways that we can?”
For Jensen, this path has painful roots, but he has journeyed through it to become someone who feels deeply, listens wholeheartedly, and loves – especially his wife and daughter – unshakably.
On to Brooklyn, Minnesota and the hardest chapter yet
“We had this real creative period of time, and we came up with this idea for a movie,” Jensen said.
Jensen was born in a small town in Minnesota and Blank went to college there. After the aneurysm, they returned there to vacation with friends who have a production company. The group began to “percolate” a movie idea, and brought it to fruition with Sadie, Jensen and Blank’s daughter, joining the family business to act opposite Amy Madigan.
“I learned so much working with her, and we made this sweet family film,” Jensen said. “It was about coming across the great divide that seems to be dividing this country – but it’s also funny. It’s called ‘Brooklyn, Minnesota.’ And so two days before we were about to finish filming, there was some blood in the bathroom where there shouldn’t have been blood, and there was a lot of it. I told Jess to come in and look, because I thought maybe I was hallucinating or something.
And she’s like, ‘Yeah, we need to get you to a doctor.’”
Jensen woke up from a colonoscopy to learn that he had Stage 4 cancer.
“After this amazing moment that we’d had as a family, I was suddenly fearing that we would lose each other and lose that beautiful intercommunication that we always had, but we actually had focused into something real,” Jensen said. “It was hard news, but our entire community – including ‘The Walking Dead’ community, because I’ve done a few episodes of ‘The Walking Dead,’ and Scott Gimple, my friend who runs the show, put it out there that I was having a problem. We’re middle class, but we don’t have the funds to hire a nurse to help. Obviously, I was going to be out of work for a long period of time. And all of a sudden, this community of people that I’d never even met before raised all this money for us on our GoFundMe so my wife could take care of me. It was incredibly generous, and it gave me faith in this country again, it gave me faith in love and how love is surrounding us all the time – we just don’t know it. It was a pretty long road. And then after a year and three quarters of hard chemo and lots of surgery, they gave me the all clear. That was really wonderful news to get.”
During the course of cancer treatment, Jensen had a “sort of grim” thought about what would happen to his lifetime of possessions if the worst happened.
“My daughter will probably take one of my 10 guitars and my mandolin, and Jessica will take the stuff that’s meaningful to us. But there was a bunch of stuff, including all my Star Wars toys from when I was a kid, my action figures from when I was a kid, and this huge 3,000 comic book collection that I carried around the country with me,” Jensen said. “I’ve been collecting since I was 12 and obviously some were too well loved to sell, but I started doing this project of picking out the best ones that were in the best condition.”
Jensen had them protected in plastic cases and graded, so those who care about such details will know what they are buying, and he is selling them online, with the proceeds benefiting Memorial Sloan Kettering Children’s Center.
“Comic books are connected to kids, and Memorial Sloan Kettering saved my life,” Jensen said. “It was a thank you note to them and to all of these kids who struggle with a very adult thing that’s very scary. I’m an adult. I’ve got emotional background behind me, I’ve got therapy, I’ve got my family, my wife – but for a kid, I can’t even imagine how scary that is, not to mention the parents.”
More stories, more love, more laughs
“Brooklyn, Minnesota” just finished on the festival circuit, and the Blank-Jensen creative team is on to new endeavors.
“We’re always following the story that touches our heart the most,” Jensen said.
Right now, the pair is working on a to-be-announced “documentary oriented” play, and they’re filming something they can’t spoil just yet, except to say that it’s going to be funny. Good medicine? Indeed.
“I needed to write that with Jessica, because laughter was so much of the essential part of getting through cancer,” Jensen said. “It was necessary for some laughter to be there, because I wouldn’t have survived without it.”
Next steps:
Love comics? Buy from Jensen’s collection on eBay and mycomicshop to support Memorial Sloan Kettering Children’s Center.
To keep up with what’s next, including the release of “Brooklyn, Minnesota,” follow Blank and Jensen online at instagram.com/jessicacblank and instagram.com/ejensen123.
Blank and Jensen told their behind-the-scenes love story in their book, “Living Justice: Love, Freedom, and the Making of The Exonerated.”
If you found us through Substack, welcome! Please take a look at our main site, The Human Page, to find out why we do what we do, how you can support our efforts to get more books in the hands of kids, and much more.