Politics & Power Quote by Tony Randall

Randall’s line lands like a well-mannered confession from someone who spent a lifetime watching American theater treat permanence as a luxury item. The phrasing is almost comic in its modesty: “my first goal,” not “my dream,” as if founding a permanent acting company were merely the opening bullet point on a reasonable to-do list. That understatement is the tell. He’s naming a structural failure in U.S. stage culture while sounding like a guy apologizing for missing a dinner reservation.

The specific intent is practical and pointed: Randall wanted the National Actors Theatre to operate like a repertory institution, with a stable ensemble that could build shared craft over time instead of reinventing chemistry every production. A permanent company means continuity, risk-taking, and a house style; it also means salaries, benefits, and long-term commitments - the things American theater struggles to fund because the ecosystem rewards events, names, and quick returns.

The subtext is a quiet indictment of a Broadway-adjacent model that fetishizes the “limited run” and the celebrity cast. Randall, a TV-famous performer who used his cultural capital to champion classical theater, is acknowledging that even he couldn’t bend the economics and attention spans into something more European in spirit. There’s also an elegiac note: the “National” in the theater’s name carries an aspiration the country never quite underwrites. His failure isn’t personal incompetence; it’s a snapshot of how difficult it is to institutionalize seriousness in an entertainment market built to keep moving.