Anna D. Shapiro

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

My main interest is in cultivating my company.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.