Samuel Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot,' billed as 'the laugh sensation of two continents,' made its American debut at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, in Miami, Florida, in 1956. My father, Bert Lahr, was playing Estragon, one of the two bowler-hatted tramps who pass the time in a lunar landscape as they wait in vain for the arrival of a Mr. Godot.

Identity is memory; when memory disappears, the self dissolves and love with it.

Death of a Salesman' is a brilliant taxonomy of the spiritual atrophy of mid-twentieth-century white America.

In 1957, “West Side Story” had introduced the musical to the reckless dark side of teen-age life; “Bye Bye Birdie,” set in Sweet Apple, Ohio, where the citizens apparently dress mostly in chartreuse, mauve, orange, periwinkle, and turquoise, was a walk on the bright side.

When Elvis made his mass-media debut on 'The Ed Sullivan Show' - his notorious gyrations filmed only from the waist up - I fell off the family chaise longue with delight.

Angels in America' - which is composed of two three-hour plays, 'Millennium Approaches' and 'Perestroika' - proved to be a watershed drama, the most lyrical and ambitious augury of an era since Tennessee Williams's 'The Glass Menagerie.

I detest literature. I abominate the theatre. I have a horror of culture. I am only interested in magic!