Lloyd Richards: Now, that’s why I’m in the theater. To take those lives, to reveal them. Not just those lives, any life. And that’s what’s important about theater, or should be. It does reflect the lives of a totality of a community that exists out there, and does speak to the totality of that community. Not all at once, but through its own particularness, which is what Raisin did. Other people were able to find themselves in it. I remember when we first did Fences at Yale Rep. My promotional manager, a wonderful woman, she had come to see a run-through, and she sat with me afterwards. She said, “Do you know, I looked at the play, and I looked at that role that James Earl Jones is playing, and I said, ‘you know, that’s the man down the street. I know him, that’s the man down the street.'” A little further into the play, she said, “No, that’s not the man down the street, that’s my brother.” And a little further, “No, not my brother, that’s my father.” At the end of the play, she said, “I said to myself, no, that’s not my father, that’s me.” And it’s that kind of universality that stems from particularity, that makes a work of value that reaches out beyond itself. Not by trying to reach out beyond itself, but by reaching deeper into itself, to its own truth. And that’s what’s wonderful about theater for me.