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This play is a result of a commission through The Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science & Technology Project.  How did that come about and how did the commission process shape what the play became?

I applied for a Sloan grant with a short proposal of how my story and the science would intertwine.  Ensemble Studio Theatre (EST) chose my idea and helped me refine it by tightening the focus and urging me to edit a lot of the story details out.  They wanted my imagination to be free in the writing process.  That was a great gift as my original conception was a five-character play and I’m glad I wasn’t held to that.  Then they submitted the rewritten proposal to the Sloan scientists who made the final decision in concert with EST.

When the play was finally written, the artistic staff of EST read the “first” draft of the play (really my fourth; earlier drafts were workshopped in my EST Playwrights Unit).  The artistic staff critiqued it and I went off to ponder their excellent questions and suggestions.  I filled in some holes in the storytelling and fleshed out the scientist’s p.o.v. more—they felt I wasn’t being quite fair to him.

Then EST and the Sloan Foundation sponsored a three-day residency at Space on Ryder Farm.  There the play was read cold (Grant Shaud was cast as Royston) to the community of actors, playwrights and directors in residence and there was a discussion afterwards.  Finally, the “second” draft of the play (actually, the sixth?) was read in EST’s public First Light Festival.  That’s when Lily Balsen came on board.  That reading went so well that EST phoned Underground Railway Theater in Boston, which was looking for science-related plays for their Catalyst Collaborative @ MIT program.  Sloan helped fund a workshop of the play in Boston with different actors and then Underground Railway/Central Square Theater premiered it in its season this past spring.

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You are not Muslim or Arab American yourself (or a research biologist for that matter!), but I know you’ve done a great deal of research to understand and represent these worlds.  Can you speak about how you accumulated that foundation of knowledge?

When it came to the character of Yasmeen, I worked very hard to get the details “right,” bearing in mind that no one character can represent an entire community.  I have strong ties with and a love for Arab culture.  I am half Sicilian-American.  Sicily has deep cultural, genetic and historical roots in North Africa as the Arabs ruled Sicily for almost 200 years.  Our music, food and many of our social mores derive from Arab culture.  A market in Palermo looks more like an Arab souk than it does an Italian market in Florence.

Additionally, in college and after, I was in a long-term relationship with a fellow student who was of Lebanese descent.  His family became my second family and I met many of his relatives from Lebanon and other Arab countries.  I also learned about the food, language, politics, etc. through them.

And as I mentioned above, I taught in the public schools.  I taught many girls like Yasmeen who were facing the dilemma she faces: how do you navigate between two cultures with often opposing agendas.  It wasn’t hard to create a composite of my students in the character of Yasmeen.

The book All American Yemeni Girls by Loukia K. Sarroub was particularly helpful for the details of Yemeni-American working class life, and the particular challenges Yemeni-American girls face in the public schools, as well as the strengths they derive from the experience.  I also studied as much about the Muslim religion as I could in the several years it took me to write the play, mostly through reading the Quran and books about the religion, but also through asking questions.

When it came time to more deeply understand the specifics of Yasmeen’s emotional life, I interviewed many women of Muslim and/or Arab descent.  They were remarkably candid in telling me their stories after people in their communities, whom I took the time to get to know, introduced me to them.  Because I am coming at the character of Yasmeen from an outsider’s perspective, I know what non-Muslim Americans don’t know and what they are curious about, and I felt I could represent that curiosity through Dr. Royston in this play.

Finally, in the long developmental process for this play (four workshops around the country), I was often lucky enough to have devoted and excited Muslim-American actresses and assistant directors who could point out even minor errors in the script so that every line was vetted by numerous women.  I am grateful for the gifts of their knowledge, humor and insight.

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As for the science: I spent two years researching the science of love by reading many books and scientific experiments; listening to podcasts; watching videos; and attending regular seminars at the New York Academy of Sciences.  I also studied other areas such as brain science, behavioral economics, fruit flies, animal mating, cheating in science, etc.  I always knew that I wanted the science of my play to serve as a metaphor for what was happening between the characters emotionally.  But since I only had a vague idea of what my story was going to be when I began, I had to learn more science than I would need.

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It was also important to learn about the daily life of an academic scientist and I am grateful to the scientists the Sloan Foundation connected me with late in the process at Columbia University, scientists who understood the imperatives of storytelling, particularly Stuart Firestein, chair of Biology there who used to be a theatre director.  I also found Dr. Aliza Holtz at Touro College who connected me to my most extraordinary interview: a young Hasidic woman, Rachel Gutnik, told me her remarkable life story and proved that the dilemma Yasmeen faces in this play is not unique to her culture or faith.

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How has working on this play illuminated your world in a different way?  What have you learned?

I must admit that there were times during the research for this play—when I confronted my own and our culture’s ignorance about Islam—that I sometimes despaired about our ability to talk to one another across religious and cultural divides, and my ability to build a bridge from one culture to another.  Slowly and carefully over the years of writing this play I built that bridge, and eventually crossed it myself, and it’s a joyous place to be.

You titled the play “Paradise.”  What does that mean to you?

There are many meanings for the word paradise in this play and I hope audiences will discover them for themselves.  Yasmeen and Dr. Royston quest after their own conceptions of paradise.  But perhaps my most favorite and personal definition of the word is this: to be in sync with another human being.  That is the closest we can come to paradise here on this earth.