Time & Perspective Quote by Linda Lavin

Lavin’s praise is doing double duty: it flatters the script while staking a claim for her own seriousness as an artist. Calling the play “one of the very few” great works she’s read “in a long, long time” isn’t just a compliment; it’s a quietly competitive swipe at a theatre ecosystem she’s lived through, where actors are often offered roles that feel serviceable rather than nourishing. The repetition stretches the disappointment into something you can feel in the mouth: long drought, sudden rain.

What makes the line work is how it pivots from canon-building to intimacy. “The power of the writing” is an objective-sounding standard, but she immediately translates that power into an actor’s hunger: a chance “to explore many facets of myself.” That’s not vanity; it’s labor. Great roles don’t simply showcase talent, they demand it, forcing an actor to toggle between registers - comic timing, vulnerability, contradiction - without the safety net of a single defining trait. Her phrasing, “gives me the actor,” is telling: she separates the professional instrument from the private person, suggesting that the self onstage is crafted, not confessed.

The subtext is also about agency late in a career. For a performer long associated with a culturally legible persona, the promise of “many facets” signals escape from typecasting and nostalgia. Lavin is arguing that comedy can be serious terrain, that dramatic depth and comic precision aren’t opposites but co-conspirators. She isn’t just endorsing a play; she’s announcing what kind of work still feels worth doing.