Q: Are you very careful about who you give rights to perform your plays to?

A: Yes, you do at first. Certainly, the Rosensweigs has not been performed outside of this tour, as yet. But you know that sometime in this play's [future], somebody's going to be playing Gorgeous as a nightmare, it'll be a new cause for anti-Semitism in our time; it could be just hideous.

Q: What was it like being on "Letterman" last month?

A: I really, really like him. I've been on a few times before. It's funny when you're on a show like that, you feel like you know somebody but you realize, "I have basically spent 12 minutes with this man." I think he's a very, very smart man. I was on his show during the Gulf War. The first night it was canceled, and the second night, when they were bombing Tel Aviv, I got this call that said "come" and I kind of felt, "Well I believe in comedy and if this is what's happening, if this is [when] the world blows up, I might as well be on the David Letterman show." So, off I went to the Letterman show and, during the break, he was talking to me, and he said, "You know it's very hard on a night like this to figure out what note to hit." You don't want to do anything hilarious because it's not respectful but simultaneously it's a comedy show. And he put on a brilliant show.

Q: When you were at Mt. Holyoke, women's history was first introduced into the curricula--did that seem momentous?

A: I thought it explained everything. It was like the world totally opened up. I remember when I took that class my senior year, and we read the Feminine Mystique, Germaine Greer, Kate Millet, and suddenly everything made sense, that's it, there you go. And I just thought, this is all unfair, this is deeply unfair.

Q: Did you worry about meeting your parent's expectations?

A: Oh my God, oh my God, yes. I was like lost [those two years in New York], I didn't know what was going to happen to me, that's why I applied to school, I thought I've got to get out of this, I've got to pull myself together. Yes, I was terrified. When I went to Holyoke, there was the saying, "Smith to bed, Holyoke to wed." And I did have a Yale boyfriend, who was my high school boyfriend, and a part of me just thought, I should do all these things I don't really want to do, but if you do them, then you're fine, and no one will [worry] about you. I really thought, go to business school, move to Chicago, go become Mary Tyler Moore in the Mary Tyler Moore show and they won't worry about you either. I was always someone who had one foot in both places, half of me was the nice girl from Mt. Holyoke. But, for someone like me, probably one of the reasons why I thought I have a voice and I had this need to put all these girls on stage comes from that time. I'm sure of it.