Aging & Wisdom Quote by Jane Alexander

A lot is packed into Alexander's careful understatement: "It would be difficult" is doing the kind of polite, public-facing work that usually masks a stronger claim - that it should be difficult, and that anyone trying will have to answer for it. She locates the argument in "this day and age", a phrase that can sound like hand-waving until you hear the subtext: the culture has changed, the money has changed, and the permission structures around language have changed. In other words, even if an artist wants to plead historical realism or provocation, the gatekeepers no longer have to pretend that neutrality is the same as taste.

The line also exposes the quiet power of funding as censorship-by-infrastructure. Alexander isn't talking about banning. She's talking about budgets, donors, boards, advertisers, grants - the ecosystem that decides what gets made before critics ever weigh in. That's what gives the quote its bite: it shifts the battleground from "free speech" theatrics to the more mundane reality that art is often a coalition of risk management.

"Art that made racial slurs" is phrased bluntly, almost clumsily, as if to strip away the euphemisms artists and institutions use ("period-accurate language", "challenging material"). She forces the listener to sit with the actual act: making, staging, amplifying a slur. Coming from an actress - someone whose job is to embody words written by others - the implication lands with extra weight: performance isn't just representation; it's reactivation.