Being the hyper-organized person she is, what do you think draws her to someone like Steven, who feels a bit messy in life and his decisions?
AH: [Me, Rebecca, and Peter Dinklage] had a lot of conversations about that, about what it is, and the fact that their beginning would have been really messy. Falling in love with a patient is a really big deal. I actually called a therapist I know to say, “Walk me through exactly how this would work,” because I sensed it was a big deal, and she talked me through exactly why it’s such a big deal. They just got hit by this really strong need to be together, and I think they honored it and respected each other so much. They were ultimately such a safe choice for each other, [in] that they were both suffocating.
Peter and I had a lot of conversations about how do we have anti-chemistry, like in a way that brings the audience in. We don’t want to repel people with the anti-chemistry, but you have to be like, “Oh yeah—no, no, no.” Also not in a violent way. The way we usually think about people who shouldn’t be together is they’re miserable in these really toxic ways, and it’s like [Patricia and Steven] are not necessarily toxic. It’s not like that, but neither one is particularly thriving.
RM: They are functional as a couple.
AH: They are so functional. They are functional to the point of dysfunctional.
Can we talk about her faith and why she is so drawn to the Catholic church?
RM: I think that finally real faith is a bit of a mystery. I don’t think you can say, “I have faith because of this.” The way that I wrote her is that she has a father who is Jewish, her mother was Catholic, but she went to Catholic school. She’s a person with a big religious capacity, and some people are born like that. That was the religion that she finds herself more and more keenly drawn to. I don’t think there’s a logic to that, and that’s one of the things that undercuts her very logical secular life, is this other thing. It’s, in a funny way, this wild part of her, even though we don’t necessarily see religious faith as being that, but I think at its purest form it is.
AH: It’s funny. I was really lucky I got to go to the opening night of the opera in New York, and it was Dead Man Walking. I think we’re all familiar with the story, and in it, there’s an aria where the lead character is describing herself. She’s a nun, and she’s saying Jesus was a hothead, and so am I, and I just remember thinking, “Oh that’s funny. We don’t often think about it in those terms.” For Patricia, what Rebecca is saying is really interesting—that idea that she has these urges. She has these desires, and they are really out of step with what we understand to be a modern woman.
Part of the reason that she is having a hard time opening up to them is because it doesn’t make sense to her. It doesn’t make any logical sense, and she doesn’t know what part of herself she has to deny in order to follow this path, but ultimately, it is a mystery. I think that there’s a very long, continuous streak of mystics in our species in our history, and she is one of them.
RM: It doesn’t match her life—it pulls her apart.
AH: She has such a mystical life, but it kind of bubbled up inside of her until she couldn’t repress it anymore.
