"I love It Happened One Night, which was… I’m trying to remember what year that was; was it 1929? But it was just this great, fantastic kind of screwball comedy, like one of the first real romantic comedies, and I think it was also like the first film to win all of the major academy awards. I’m a big Capra fan; I ove Frank Capra’s movies. That film really resonated with me when I saw it. Any chance I ever have to see that is great. I actually saw it in a movie theater once, and it was such a great experience. To see classic movies like that in a movie theater, it’s an opportunity that you rarely have. I really love that."

"I saw this movie at the Academy of Music in Northampton, Massachusetts, when I was thirteen. It was my introduction to Chekhov, and it changed my life. I think I went into the theater in large part because of this movie . . . I didn’t see much theater as a kid, and this was my first clue as to what it could be like. They really nailed what’s so great about Chekhov, and it made total sense to a thirteen-year-old girl in Massachusetts. Then all the Chekhov I saw after that as a young adult that was so terrible and haughty and faux-British . . . I’m just really grateful that this was my first encounter with his work. Wally Shawn’s performance is incredible, too."

"I can remember the exact theaters I saw Spike Lee movies in since I was in college, which I can’t say for any other director’s films. “BlacKkKlansman” is no exception. The theater was SILENT for the last five minutes, when the film jumps from fiction to nonfiction. It’s a brilliant choice only Spike would have done."

"Another favorite of my vanished youth that withstands the test of time. It’s a huge, rolling pageant of a film, and Carné and Jacques Prévert get down and dirty with the Paris of the mid-nineteenth century, from which Arletty’s Garance surges up irrepressible and unscathed by the turbulence of life about her in the theater world."

"“Of shapes transformed to bodies strange” — Ovid’s theme is Shakespeare in a nutshell. As a theater fanatic, I discovered Ovid in my 40s when I wrote my PhD thesis on Renaissance Tragicomedy. For me, the root of drama and language is the invisible made visible in the shape-changing of sex, love, life and death. Not to mention food."