From NY Times, by Deborah Sontag:

AS girls Alison Pill, the actor, and Sarah Treem, the playwright, never stuttered when adults asked them what they wanted to be when they grew up.

Ms. Pill hired an agent at 10 after a successful gig reading textbooks on tape and quickly found steady work on American and Canadian television in Toronto, her hometown. Ms. Treem was 12 when her first play — written in rhyming couplets with the refrain “Who am I going to sit with at lunch?” — won a statewide young playwrights contest and was staged in Connecticut.

From early on, the two precocious girls impressed adults with their unwavering drive until suddenly, disconcertingly, they were adults themselves, wondering: Were they really good at what they did, or had they just been good for their age? Would they be accepted by their professional mentors as peers? Did their achievements make them happy?

Last winter, when Ms. Pill, 23, and Ms. Treem, then 28, were both grappling with such questions, they came together and bonded fiercely on the set of “In Treatment,” the HBO therapy drama starring Gabriel Byrne. They had become friendly the summer before at the Sundance Institute Theater Lab, but with “In Treatment” their connection intensified as Ms. Treem wrote the seven episodes for Ms. Pill’s character, April, a smart, complicated, stubbornly independent architecture student with whom they both identified.

“Alison kept reading the scripts, saying, ‘You’re writing my life,’ and I was like, ‘No, actually, I’m writing my life,’ ” Ms. Treem said during a recent joint interview with Ms. Pill. “We just hit a perfect storm of personality and art. It will probably never happen again.”

Ms. Pill, the more effervescent of the two, countered: “Sure it will. You can just keep writing for me, Sarah. It’s cool. Just write stuff, and then I’ll do it.”

For the sake of this article, Ms. Pill and Ms. Treem were speaking — animatedly, their words spilling over each other’s — via an Internet videophone hook-up. Ms. Pill, who is strawberry blond and slender with a cherubic face, lives in the East Village; Ms. Treem, tall and dark-haired with an intense poise, lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn. But the two friends have not been in the city simultaneously since “In Treatment” began its second season early last month. (The show’s sixth episode featuring April is Sunday night, and its final one is May 24.)

Ms. Pill has been back in Toronto shooting “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” a Universal Pictures movie starring Michael Cera in which she plays the drummer in his band. This caps a busy 15 months in which she turned in a memorable performance in “Milk” as Harvey Milk’s motorcycle-driving lesbian campaign manager, earned critical praise as an expletive-spitting powerhouse of rage in Neil LaBute’s play “reasons to be pretty,” spent three weeks at Sundance and then, after Ms. Treem recommended her for the part, did “In Treatment.”
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