Aaron: Anne, at what point did you get involved in this process?


Anne: I came in at the point where Amy had basically the version we have today. And I have to say I feel it’s very rare that when a playwright struggles with play for so long and has so many draſts, that it has such success. It has a successful structure and story and I think achieves what Amy has set out to do. Tat’s pretty exciting.


Amy: In college I had a creative writing teacher, Laura King, for a class I took called “Daily Temes” in which we had to write a short assignment or “theme” every day of the week. On the first day of the course King gave this amazing lecture about being a writer and one of the things she said was “You’re going to be writing something every day this semester. Some of these themes will take you five minutes and will come out perfect on the first shot, some of them will take you hours and hours and hours and you’ll struggle and you’ll be miserable. What’s amazing is that at the end of the semester you’re going to read back over them and you’re not going to be able to tell which is which.” And I’m so glad somebody said that to me because I think it’s really easy when you’re in the middle of a hard process to say, “Tis is just ill-fated, it’s just never going to happen.” And I don’t think there’s necessarily a correlation between how long a process takes and the success of the final product.


Aaron: You’ve both talked about this piece as a thriller, and in the first rehearsal, Anne, you mentioned the use of “charged objects.” Meaning, for example, if a weapon is introduced on stage, the audience has expectations for how that object might eventually be used in the story. Tere are a number of what we might call “charged objects” that appear onstage in Belleville. Can you talk about where these charged items came from and how you collaborated, as playwright and director, to theatrically execute how they are used onstage to further the suspense?


Anne: Tey were in the script.


Amy: Tey were in the script. But the way they’re used —how they’re introduced, where they’re positioned—is all direction.


Anne: It’s a very conscious genre thing, which is great, because it’s just fun. We watched these different movies as research—


8


Amy: Like Suspicion and Gaslight. It’s different onstage than in film, though, because onstage, when you put something down, the audience knows where it is and it is one static thing. In movies, it’s not always in the frame. It’s really interesting playing with cinematic tropes but using them in a completely different way.


Anne: I think looking at those older movies, they can also be really heavy handed.


Amy: Oh, totally.


Gaslight movie poster


Anne: So it’s interesting working against that in a static space and trying to figure out how to not be heavy handed when the objects are always within view.


Amy: Tat’s right. Tere’s a lot of calibration around all of this—exactly how many times does something get mentioned, and when is too much.


Anne: I think the ground plan for the apartment is very carefully designed to elude the eye of the audience. Wherever you’re sitting, you get a slightly different view. Tis play is a lot about misinterpreted action, and misinterpreted sounds, or the struggle to interpret something that you’re not quite sure of.


http://www.flickr.com/photos/andyz/37530109/


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18