Politics & Power Quote by Tony Randall

Randall isn’t daydreaming about togas and iambic pentameter; he’s making a blunt, almost municipal argument for culture as infrastructure. The line’s power comes from how unromantic it is. He doesn’t frame classical theater as a luxury for the cultivated. He treats it like a library, a park, a hospital wing: something a town of 100,000 simply ought to budget for because civic life is thinner without it.

The specificity of “town of 100,000” matters. It rejects the idea that “serious” art belongs only in coastal capitals or donor-rich enclaves. Randall is pushing against America’s habit of outsourcing cultural authority to New York, Los Angeles, and the occasional festival town, leaving most places with touring musicals, school auditoriums, and a perpetual sense that “real” theater happens elsewhere. He’s also nudging audiences to see Shakespeare and the Greeks not as elite status markers but as a shared public language - one you can stumble into on a weeknight, not plan a trip around.

The subtext is a quiet indictment: the U.S. calls itself advanced while treating arts funding as optional, suspect, or privately sponsored. His phrase “as they have in every civilized country” is deliberately provocative, a little actorly jab meant to shame a nation that bristles at being compared. Coming from Randall - who spent a career straddling mass entertainment and repertory seriousness - it reads as both plea and corrective: if you want a democracy with memory, nuance, and emotional range, you subsidize the stage.