>Olga--I'll get the hang of this message business yet--thanks for the tidbit about double dads. At the risk of stirring up things, I pose a question: because there is a one-in-ten-million chance that a phenonmenon CAN happen, does it mean that you want to build it into a character? More questions: Do you seek to create characters that are NOT like most of us? Or, because most of us do not seek the aid of a therapist, am I naive about the perversions and possibilities in the lives of wayward ones . . .Responses not necessarily required.

>Leslie T.

We chose a psychiatrist and his patients as the setting for this collaborative hyperdrama mostly because people in that setting are expected to speak honestly about internal emotional states and external events in their lives. Conversation that was quite emotionally revealing would sound awkward in a normal social setting, but would be right at home in a therapist's office. We wanted the writers to feel that they had a great degree of freedom to explore their characters--either developing them deeply as characters or giving them narrative to react to. I think that it is most interesting when the reader can relate to the problems suffered by the character--although the character's problems might be in a more exaggerated form than the answering echo from the reader. If a character is truly mad, they might be intellectually interesting to read, but devoid of any emotional tie to the reader. But a little mad...well, there's madness in us all.