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So do you feel like you fought the good fight and emerged victorious?

No, I'll never have that kind of hubris ñ ever! We all know that the fate of the theater depends greatly on the fate of the economy. Because it's too expensive, even at regional theaters. It is sort of a boutique service in that it's a one-of-a-kind, highly labor-intensive event that happens only once a day at a certain hour, and for a limited amount of time.

So the minute the economy goes south, which with the mortgage debacle and everything else that's happening, to make a living in theater will fall by the wayside, I'm afraid. Theater will never die. It will survive in church basements and community auditoriums and hole-in-the-wall theaters where people are holding down three jobs to do theater at night. Because people who love theater are never going to let it die. It's just what we do.

From the way you talk and the way you bear yourself onstage, I don't get the impression that you have any desire for Hollywood fame or any kind of glamour or adulation — that theater and doing good theater is really what you're about.

It really is. And I have been so lucky beyond anything I ever imagined, in terms of my success, that if I were told tomorrow that I would be basically playing in The Cherry Orchard, carrying the samovar for the rest of my career, I would feel damn lucky. Because it means I get to be in the green room, hanging out with young actors every night.

It's also the camaraderie of theater. It's just a wonderful place to get to go every night of your working life, and commune with others. I remember Jason Robards — I got to have this remarkable, brief conversation with Mr. Robards at the very end of his life, and it was while I was doing A Moon for the Misbegotten. He at first was apologizing for not getting to see it. He pointed to the obvious dent in his cranium.

He said, "I've been meaning to come, but I had this brain cancer and brain tumor."

That's a good excuse!

He was sort of laughing in that wonderful sort of gallows-humor way of his, and then finally he confessed that he couldn't come see it because there were too many ghosts there for him and he couldn't possibly see it. Then he started telling me these unbelievable stories.

And the thing about Jason Robards was he would be talking about the stagehands or this person or that person from 40 years ago — he not only knew their first names, he knew their last names 40 years later! He just loved the camaraderie of it.

And I have to tell you one quick Colleen story, since you're a lover of Colleen's. He said that on nights when she didn't like the audience, and he was upstage and she was downstage and she would turn around and face him, she'd make her false teeth come out and go, "Vra, vra, vra, vra, vra!"

Don't you ever do that!

Then in The Pieta in the transition between Act III and Act IV, she would be cradling him as the night turned into dawn, and she would coo into his ear to speed up the last act, because he had a new babysitter at home, and she knew that the boys would probably burn down the house. Oh, gosh! But anyway, the camaraderie.

You get all this acclaim for being the first out-of-the-closet lesbian to win the Tony Award. Was it that camaraderie and that ethos of just doing it and being among the actors that shaped your decision at the outset of your career — did you come out because it didn't make any difference whether you achieved fame or whether it destroyed your career?

Yeah, yeah. I didn't care. It never occurred to me to go through life lying about anything because it just doesn't seem healthy — if you have a choice. And I sensed I had a choice, because I was going into theater. And as you know, theater is rife with homosexuals.

Rife!

Rife!

It's great to hear a gay person say that theater is crawling with 'em! But you look at all the plays that are onstage on Broadway and off-Broadway, and it's tough to find a straight play sometimes.

Oh, listen. I had a lot of straight playwright friends who were ready to shoot themselves in the early 90s! Because thank God there was the kind of response to the AIDS crisis that there was within the playwriting community and the theater community. But I know it was tough, especially for male straight playwrights. They felt besieged, or just put-out-to-pasture I guess is the better way to put it.