If You Don't Dance They Beat You

If You Don't Dance They Beat You is an engrossing memoir of four decades in the American theater by Tony Award-winning director Jose Quintero. With characteristic fervor, insight, and a great deal of humor, he recounts an extraordinary career that began in the golden age of the American stage in the 1950s and continues today. Quintero was co-founder of the original Circle in the Square, and he gives an intimate chronicle of its birth in his Greenwich Village apartment and its first outstanding success with Tennessee Williams' Summer and Smoke to its dramatic closing night a decade later with Thornton Wilder reading from Our Town.

If You Don't Dance They Beat You is filled with richly detailed portraits of such figures as Carlotta Monterey O'Neill, George C. Scott, Colleen Dewhurst, Jason Robards, Geraldine Page, Dame Judith Anderson, Vivien Leigh, Ingrid Bergman, and many others. Above all, it presents a self-portrait by one of the most unusual and distinguished directors currently working on the American stage.