LILY: No, I tried. I had one class with somebody, and I can’t think of his name right now — I’ve seen him as an actor in different projects. But, I just couldn’t get it. If I tried to do what they were talking about in class, people would just look at me kind of horror-stricken when I’d finish a scene. I must have just been bizarre.

MARY: All those characters – don’t you live with them? It seems like they’re part of your house.

LILY: Well, they are, but because I get to invent them. When I have to do someone else’s stuff, someone else’s character, I’m not entirely sure what it is. Even a comedy like “9 to 5,” when we were doing it, I had to pretend because it — “9 to 5“ was a little bit instructional. I mean, underneath, it was about having day care and getting equal pay. I pretended that we were really Violet and Doralee and Judy, and that we were making an educational film about office workers.

MARLO: That’s a good idea. You know what that’s called? That’s called an “as if.”

JOAN: So, last question to Marlo and Lily: How do you remember the lines?

MARLO: That’s really not hard.

LILY: I’m always amazed at people. After you do something on the stage and people will say, “God, how do you remember the words?” And you think, “Surely that’s not what they’re coming away with — the fact that I knew the lines.”

MARLO: I don’t know why it isn’t hard, but because you rehearse. Lily does so many characters and she doesn’t even have many places to move around on the stage. But when you’re in a play, the lines are connected to the physical movements. So that when I get up from the couch — I mean you’d have to shoot me in the head not to get me to say the line when I stood up.

LILY: Muscle memory, of course. If you’ve done a project – done a play or a piece like that, and you come back to it five years later, you’ll … the muscle memory will be so strong.

MARLO: It’s right there.

MARY: But you don’t do it at home, do you? You don’t get up off the couch and say that line?

MARLO: No, no, no, no, no. But it’s funny. It really is true. We did “Roger is Dead” in San Francisco several months ago and now we’ve done it in New Jersey, and are hoping to bring it to New York. When we did it in San Francisco, she did some rewrites. And Elaine added new lines in the middle of these scenes that we’d already played for, four and four – rehearsed four weeks and played four weeks. And those were the hard lines to remember because your body had moved to a whole other rhythm. And now you were throwing in – just little things. I’d put the tea over there. And it was like, God, you couldn’t even remember that one little line, because your body did remember another way. And that was actually harder than learning the whole play. It’s interesting.

LILY: I was such a fan of Elaine May and Mike Nichols when they first started working [An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May]. And one night, many years later, I did a big benefit at the Hollywood Bowl. They were already famous for many other things by this time. But I’d been so influenced by them and Elaine was there — I’d never met her — but she was in the front row or somewhere near …

MARLO: Oh, God.

LILY: … and I remember I heard her laugh at this one line and — forever that line was like magic to me.

JOAN: What’s the line?

LILY: It was in “Tell Miss Sweeney Goodbye,” this monologue I have where I say, “This year I’ve got to buckle down. The second grade is serious business.”