for her. Te title lingers aſterward as a reminder of what everyone thought the city was.


Amy: My process has been different for every play. Te starting point for Aſter the Revolution and 4000 Miles was my family. Tere were characters loosely based on members of my family so for both of those plays there was an accidental lifelong research process. Great God Pan happened very quickly. I wrote the first draſt in a few days and that remained, sort of, the [essence of the] play. Writing Belleville was unlike any other process I’ve had in terms of how many years it spanned and how many completely new first draſts I wrote. Te technical challenges of this play were different from all of the other plays I’ve written and I think that goes some distance to explaining why it was so difficult and took so long.


Aaron: Were a lot of the struggles about building the suspense in the right way? When and how to release information?


Eiffel Tower Paris, France


Anne: Design-wise, we’re sort of mining that idea with the sound, playing with the nostalgia of Paris, the beauty of it, and the romance of it mixed in with the reality of it.


Amy: A lot of Americans think of the Paris of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway, and actually, Paris


is a


completely different place. Tere’s something exciting to me about the nostalgia for something that actually doesn’t exist.


Anne: Just recently being there, it feels like there is still romance in Paris ‘Central,’ but going to Belleville, which is right outside, it does feel grittier and more real than central Paris does.


Amy: But my feeling about central Paris is that it’s a monument to the past. It doesn’t feel like it still is that place, it’s gesturing toward that memory for the sake of the tourists.


Aaron: Zooming out a little bit, do you have a writing process that you always go through?


7 Arc de Triomphe Paris, France


Amy: Yeah, exactly. All of the technical requirements of a thriller, the plot requirements. For 4000 Miles and Great God Pan, especially, I was really releasing myself from the responsibility to plot and letting character always lead. So this genre has different requirements. Tis is also a very extreme situation and an emotionally operatic situation, and so reaching the pitches that the story requires in an honest way was very difficult.


http://www.flickr.com/photos/laowaikevin/3459393546/


http://www.flickr.com/photos/tijmengombert/4179316990/


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