Dramaturg's Note
Amy Herzog forged her career by transforming incidents from her life into stage-worthy explorations of family secrets, misunderstandings, and hard-won connections—in After the Revolution a woman grapples with the reveal of her grandfather’s long-hidden betrayal; in 4000 Miles, a grandmother and grandson navigate their own evolving notions of mortality. Belleville approaches secrets and lies from a decidedly different point of view, and the play’s influences are less personal, but Herzog remains captured by stories of shifting understandings in our closest relationships, and the intersection of intimacy and deception.
Abby and Zack, the American couple at the center of Belleville, decamp to the titular bohemian enclave in Paris for Zack’s prestigious post fighting pediatric AIDS with Médecins Sans Frontières. Their lives are ostensibly perfect—until Abby returns early one afternoon and finds Zack home during his work day. The discovery prompts the emergence of other inconsistencies as Herzog reveals the depth of the anxieties the two are hiding from each other.
The precision of Belleville’s mounting tensions—the careful release of information between characters (and audience) or the way certain objects gradually shift from inconsequential to menacing—reinterprets cinematic tropes of the suspense genre. Herzog watched the 1940s psychological thrillers Gaslight and Suspicion as research: “This genre has different requirements…there’s a lot of calibration—exactly how many times does something get mentioned, and when is too much. 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.”
Belleville dissects the limitations of intimacy: how well can we ever truly know each other? Beyond the secrets people keep, Herzog explores the comfort a certain level of duplicity provides and points to the lies we let ourselves believe to feel like we can love—or be lovable—in the first place.