Anna D. Shapiro

“I think of myself as actually kind of prudish and girly, but I don't know if a lot of other people would see me that way.”

“I wish theater criticism in this country could be more of a companion piece to the experience than a warning about where not to spend your money.”

“If you think there is anything in theater that objectively exists without your point of view attached, you are wrong.”

“I'm not sure I have a role model per se, but I do deeply admire every woman who raises children and has to walk for water.”

“What I've understood is that to be funny is not my job. To see funny is my job.”

“Plays are about understanding what happens, what it means. If we just leaned into the story, for lack of a better word, it would still be a powerful story but, like delight, it might disappear an hour after you saw it.”

“Steppenwolf has always been at the center of everything in my professional life.”

“I'm getting less and less interested in the problems of youth. I'm much more interested in the idea of emotional paralysis, and I find myself less interested in work that doesn't have anything to do with a conversation about the world.”

“There are times when you're working with film people when you have to say, 'If the camera were on you, what you're doing would be perfect'.”

“I consider myself a pretty good extemporaneous speaker. Even though I don't like speaking in front of people, I don't think I'm bad at it.”

“So many of my friends are actors, and so many of them are great, and they're losing jobs to people who have never been in plays before; I understand that sometimes I'm part of the problem. But I'm trying to figure out how to balance it.”

“I would love to figure out a way to be less careful and more adventurous.”

“I'm not sure plays tell people anything. I think plays include an audience in an experience that is happening in that moment, and that's the specialness. What people take away has almost as much to do with what they bring as what we do.”

“I just feel like, for whatever reason, female playwrights don't really ask me to do their plays. Nothing would make me happier than finding the sisterhood, but I can't make them.”

“My main interest is in cultivating my company.”

“The conversation of how you do a play is my favorite conversation in the whole wide world: what a play is, why it's different than anything else, the math of the way that human behavior has to be calibrated theatrically versus anything else.”

“The one thing that never changes in America is that the white straight male is born with a promise. Women are not promised very much, and we embody our disappointment from the beginning.”

“Theater, for me, is no longer a conversation about how we destroy each other; it's much more about how we may be destroying everyone else.”