Three Tall Women

Yeah.

All right, to stretch this analogy further, what's it like when you can't take care? I mean, I don't know whether th- this is what happened with you, but I know that when she came back from being an MP, Glenda Jackson, w- who you'd directed in Three Tall Women with, uh, Laurie Metcalf and Alison Pill, was a real old handful.

Yeah.

Right?

Well, I know, I know how to do that.

I know..." I mean, it's not my, it's not a way that I w- would prefer to work, but if you want to.

And I remember once saying to her in rehearsal, because in the first act, she ha- in Three Tall Women, she has lots of monologues where she was, she was talking about her life, and, and Glenda would, was very presentational in those scenes, and which kind of let the other two actors at sea.

Oh.

We talk about the director as a sort of father figure, the director as everybody's dad in a theater, the award that was Joe's professional pinnacle, he says, and the closest he's come to feeling like a parent, wrangling the problem child that was Gle- [laughs] Glenda Jackson.

Joe directed her in Three Tall Women, and she won the Tony for it, but it was, by the sound of it, a struggle.

Uh, his praising policy and how it's changed over the course of his career, the early success that he had that led to a reckoning with himself, how a production of A Bomb in Gilead, uh, broke him open artistically, the pure experience of acting in Angels in America, for which he was Tony-nominated, the thrill of a bare stage, collaboration with Stephen Sondheim, his virtuosity with new plays and the relative lack of classics that he's directed, his debt to the great Terrence McNally, missing shows when you're a little sad, and the joys of his bonus lap.

Ah, the joys of a bonus lap.