MARLO: That’s the biggest thing, is at your will. And I think the actor has a challenge that the other arts don’t have. Writers do not have to do it right now. They can do it when they feel like it. But actors have to do it right now. You hear “Action,” or you hear “Five minutes. Places,” and that’s it. That’s when you start.

MARY: I was always expected to jump out of a cake, with some kind of an extraordinary idea for a client, to get their business, or to keep it. I was the only girl in most of the rooms. And all the men in the room would all turn their heads at some point, turn and look at me and wait for me to jump out of the cake. And if I hadn’t had really, really terrific training, I just couldn’t have jumped. It gives you the ability to use — to get together everything that you’ve got going. Your thinking, your emotions, your feeling, your strategizing. It just pulls it all together. I think that really good teaching really does give you the ability to be instantaneous.

LILY: Well, are you saying that whether you had come up with some inspired idea or not, you could jump so artfully and —

MARY: It could make it seem so easy.

MARLO: I thought you meant you had the confidence to say what you were thinking, because a lot of people don’t.

MARY: There’s a certain amount of make-believe in everybody’s job. And there are times when you have to put on a robe that you are not sure is quite the right robe, but you’ve got to do something. Somebody has to do something.

LILY: I always thought it would be great to have actors do their autobiographies by their sense memories. The stage is probably more so because you have to build a performance from beginning to end and to take you where you need to go. And then you could have a linear thing of building what got you to completion. The thing where you want to be the fullest — and a sense memory wears out after time; you have to give it a rest and then go to another one, to be really moved at some point. The sense memory might have nothing to do with where you’re going, and probably doesn’t 99 percent of the time. You just want to be filled up with a similar emotion that conveys the idea of what’s happening in that play or that film.

MARLO: For people who don’t know what a sense memory is, what one could say is the greatest universal sense memory is Christmas. Every year it’s the same scent. You know, it’s the same lights, it’s the same music. All the senses are being used. So a sense memory is using your senses, or even maybe just one sense – the smell of someone, or the sound of their voice, or the look in somebody’s eye when they either loved you or hated you or hit you or whatever. All those different senses are used to bring forth the feeling that you need for the scene you’re about to do. And the scene could be about you and a bad boss. But you might use a dog that once bit you. You want to use that specific emotion for you.

MARY: I had to climb up the fire stairs for Sandy Meisner; the fire stairs of a building, up to about the 12th floor, and steal something from underneath the hand of a man who was asleep. And if I didn’t wake him up I’d make the grade. Crawling up fire stairs — 12 floors — and crawling into a window, it gives you exactly that. It teaches you what that feeling is, exactly. And you can rely on that sometime later if that’s the way you want to feel.

JOAN: Did this poor guy know that you were coming at him to steal something?

MARY: Yes. Yes, and he’s trained to react. If he hears you he wakes up. And if he doesn’t hear, he doesn’t.

MARLO: Lily, when you do all of those characters, as I’ve seen you do on Broadway so magnificently, that’s a lot of preparation you do.

LILY: I don’t know, you two sound like you’re much more trained than I am.

MARY: But they seem so real.

LILY: Whatever technique I have, I had somehow come to by default.

JOAN: You didn’t train at all before you started?