Amy Herzog’s chilling and precise Belleville kicks off Studio’s 2014-15 season on September 3rd. The cast, designers, staff, and supporters, gathered earlier this month to celebrate its first rehearsal. Artistic Director David Muse—who also directs the production—introduced the full company and spoke about the play’s origins and influences. The following is an excerpt of his remarks:
“Amy is more or less universally acknowledged as one of the most talented and interesting young playwrights in America. She trained as an actor before turning to playwriting. Her first major appearance on the American theatre landscape was in 2010 in a production at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. Since then, her plays have been produced by some of the best regarded companies in the country: Playwrights Horizons (twice); Lincoln Center; Yale Rep; New York Theatre Workshop; Steppenwolf; Studio Theatre. She won an Obie. All before turning 35.
One of the striking things about Amy given her age is the maturity of her writing, both in dialogue and structure.
Richard Nelson—author of The Apple Family Plays and Herzog’s teacher from her days at the Yale School of Drama—praises Amy and her dialogue: “She has great, great facility for dialogue. It’s clean, it’s simple, it’s evocative, it’s witty. It’s alive and easily spoken. Very, very actable.’
I would add: she has a great ear for contemporary speech patterns. She can characterize through dialogue. She’s one of those writers whose intelligence you can sense behind the words, but not in a conspicuous way.
She’s also smart about the construction of her plays. In a departure from many of her peers, who write in a sort of cinematic vein with many locations and scenes, Amy deliberately limits her palate. Both 4000 Miles and Belleville occur in a single location. Except for its epilogue, the action of Belleville takes place in less than 24 hours. Each of her scenes is well constructed – they have an arc, a beginning, middle, and an end, and they advance the story in careful progression. Amy is cagey about the revelation of new information – it comes out so naturally and casually that you don’t feel the machinations of the playwright, but she’s controlling it very deliberately.
What I learned about Amy working on this play that I didn’t know before – she gets genre.
Number 1: 4000 Miles feels like an indie movie. Belleville is, among other things, a domestic thriller.
There’s a moment on page 6 of the play. We’ve just met this young couple living together in Paris. Zack is a doctor doing research on children and AIDS. Abby teaches yoga. Their friendly Senegalese landlord stops by, Zack steps into the shower. Nothing seems amiss. And then there’s a THUD from the bathroom. It’s surprising. Abby jumps a little, and so does the audience. She goes into the bathroom and returns a moment, saying, ‘He’s fine. He just dropped the shampoo. God, I’m jumpy.’ And so are we in the audience. That’s Amy’s doing.
She creates in this play an atmosphere of unease, of disquiet. Simple objects become charged – cell phones, a wedding photo album, a kitchen knife that’s too big for the baguette it’s meant to slice. We track these objects and we’re not sure why. By the end of the play, after a series of carefully controlled revelations, things have become emotionally operatic, and real danger is in the air. There are moments that should make the audience squirm in their seats or gasp with surprise. Classic thriller.
Now the thriller sensibility is woven deeply into this play. And a big part of the job for those of us working on the play is to nurture that unease. But Amy is careful to make this a play that isn’t driven too dominantly by its thriller plot mechanics. It’s important to her that it comes from a real place. A painfully and recognizably real place.
Which brings me to dimension number 2: the relationship play dimension. This is one of the most startlingly real depictions of a fraying relationship that I’ve ever encountered. The couple’s problems reveal themselves first in minute moments, in the little conflicts and intimacies that make a relationship. The play feels very private – these are the little bits of life that outsiders don’t see. It requires emotional, and occasionally literal, nakedness from its leads. And it turns us in the audience into voyeurs who are eavesdropping on domestic moments we aren’t supposed to witness. Animating this play is the everyday struggle between intimacy and doubt that any couple will recognize. That, and the ultimately profound unknowability of our partner.
Balancing the personal element and the thriller plot mechanics element was one of Amy’s big challenges in writing this play. She didn’t want cheap turns, a gasp line that the play turns on, plot shifts that don’t feel real, emotional episodes that aren’t earned.
And there’s a third element in the balance – the play’s political dimension. Amy is a writer who thinks and cares about politics, society, and ideas. Jim Nicola, Artistic Director of New York Theatre Workshop, notes that Amy believes that ‘private, individual experience is always inseparable from public, historical processes.’ Tim Sanford, Artistic Director of Playwrights Horizons, was drawn to Amy in part for her willingness to take on ‘ideas and history, which not everyone believes in anymore.’
A central conceit of the play is the juxtaposition of two couples: these young Americans living abroad in Paris, and the French Senegalese couple who live downstairs and are their landlords. Abby and Zack have been brought up with a particularly Western, particularly American, particularly elite-high-achieving American idea of how to approach adult life that has to do with exceptionalism and pursuing happiness and self-actualization. The other couple is focused on a different idea of what it means to live a meaningful adult life that includes making a living and raising a family. This couple, less well educated, less privileged, raised with fewer dreams – are on a path to a kind of fulfillment that is out of Zach and Abby’s grasp. Running underneath the play is Amy’s critique of that more American approach – how hollow it can be, how it can lead people away from happiness, how it comes from a place of privilege, how young people told to follow their dreams often wind up restless, aimless, medicated, and childless at 30. Amy feels that we’re at ‘a unique American moment that feels precarious and perched on the edge of a collapse.’
The play’s title comes from this end of empire sensibility. Belleville is the neighborhood in Paris where this apartment is located. The name Belleville means ‘beautiful city’ in French. Abby, like many Americans, has grown up with a deeply romantic idea of Paris – that it’s a beautiful city of love and freedom and art. And the play is about having that romantic ideal deconstructed and savaged. Paris is a place whose central district maintains an illusion of that idealized Paris for the sake of tourists, but the truth of Paris is found in neighborhoods like Belleville – places that are grittier and much more real than Abby’s fantasy; melting pot neighborhoods where complicated histories and tensions and social forces collide.
Much of the job of producing this play well is getting the balance right between these three dimensions – thriller, relationship, and politics. And to remember that there are particular kinds of pleasures that an audience has in feeling scared and in watching a relationship implode.