Now in my theater training I showed no aptitude at all.
The way theater can bring people together is so powerful.
No, I knew when I was doing theater in New York that this was what I was supposed to be doing.
After that, I started going downtown and doing a lot of theater shows in Chicago. When you go downtown there, it’s like you’re in New York, it’s like going to Broadway.
My college degree was in theater. But the real reason, if I have any success in that milieu, so to speak, is because I spent a lot of years directing, I spent a lot of years behind the camera.
Violence and nonviolence are, after all, two different forms of theater. They both depend and thrive on the response of an audience.
I feel as though I would be delighted to come back into working in the film world, and working in the theater world again. I’m just gonna see what happens.
I’m sort of one of those weird actors who whenever I do a play, I think, ‘Oh, we should film this,’ as opposed to have to belt it out of ourselves in a theater auditorium.
I was definitely a choir and theater geek.
If you are in a movie theater, you can look two people down and they are laughing while you are laughing or you can look three people down and they love that song that you love. It is living proof that you are not alone.
The Majestic Theater in 1990. That was one of my first real shows where I had 300 to 400 people there.
I didn’t come from a traditional background of studying theater and doing Shakespeare.
I feel like people want there to be this mystery between film and theater, but I just kind of went where I got jobs, you know?
In theater, you have a rehearsal period and you know just who to be.
We thought it would be great to see if you could put pop music back into musical theater.
The oldest form of theater is the dinner table. It’s got five or six people, new show every night, same players. Good ensemble; the people have worked together a lot.
I made theater very important in the beginning of my career.
I’m lucky to have worked in theater all over the world, but there’s something magical about Broadway. The audiences are smart, they’re educated. They go in ready and they’re up for it, they’re up for the party. It’s a whole different atmosphere.
Toward the end of school I started watching movies. Got a job in a movie theater in Brookline, Massachusetts.
I do it because I love acting, I love working, and whether it’s radio, television, films, theater, I don’t care as long as I can get out there and do it.
I’ve made six films since I made Secrets and Lies but I still live in London and I’d love to do theater.
I like roles that are on the extreme ends of the spectrum, and there’s special appeal in exploring these slightly forgotten plays that people might think of as subjects for academic term papers instead of live theater.
I believe that my art gets across the point that I’m in this morality theater trying to help the underdog, and I’m speaking socially here, showing concern and making psychological and philosophical statements for the underdog.
And that’s what people want to see when they go to the theater. I believe at the end of the day, they want to see themselves – parts of their lives they can recognize. And I feel if I can achieve that, it’s pretty spectacular.
People love to be told stories, but it’s the sugar that draws you into the theater.
I studied fine arts and architecture, but I decided to move into movie design because I grew up in a small town in the Marche region and spent a lot of time after school in the movie theater.
Coming from theater, and having been to acting school, and done little, small Australian independent movies, a lot of the time, it’s always about character.
I never consciously got into comedy. It was sort of one of those things where I was a theater student, I was acting, I was doing comedy, I was doing dramatic stuff, so it’s been something that I’ve always done and enjoyed doing and had an instinct to be relatively good at.
I think in any form of acting, you’re always well served if you’ve done theater.
Oh, I was completely hooked on movies and plays and theater from the time I was a day old – I was very, very early on in love with movies and I loved plays.
I don’t really have any plans in terms of what I want to do – movies, television, theater – but I’d love to do a play in New York.
And then it was like, wait, you can go to college and study theater? And act in plays? This is almost a racket, you know. And then when the opportunity came along to do it professionally, I thought I’d won the lottery.
What I love about movies is, no matter how many people are involved or how complicated the process is, at the end of the day, it’s just what’s inside of that frame. It’s going to be people sitting in a movie theater watching one shot at a time. And that’s my focus.
Well, in the theater, I think you’re actually more responsible for what is going on onstage as a director than you are in film.
It was very natural for me to want to disappear into dark theater, I am really very shy. That is something that people never seem to fully grasp because, when you are an actor, you are meant to be an exhibitionist.
Because of the power of television, I was visible to everybody all over the world. But there are many things in the theater that are more fulfilling and that I look forward to doing more. But really, I love it all: theater, film, television.
I write for a radio show that, no matter what, will go on the air Saturday at five o’clock central time. You learn to write toward that deadline, to let the adrenaline pick you up on Friday morning and carry you through, to cook up a monologue about Lake Wobegon and get to the theater on time.
If I have to, I’ll go and direct theater and talk till the cows come home.
It was considered that you were stepping down by doing television. I almost turned Cybill down because I so wanted to remain a theater actress.
I went through a few phases of finding myself: I dabbled in musical theater, chess club, dance troupe, splatter-painting, school mascot (go Wildcats), babysitter, photojournalist, drill team girl, emo kid – and not one of them defined me, but every single one will always play a part in who I am.
I was chomping at the bit to get my career started – so after I took all the theater courses at Brooklyn College I enrolled in a two year program at AMDA in the city (The American Musical Dramatic Academy) I was there for 6 months and loved it.
I attend surprisingly few shows. The type of theater that is popular today just doesn’t appeal to me.
There’s a way in which ‘The Illusion’ is a play about the theater.
The movie theater is never going away. If that was a case why are there still restaurants? People still have kitchens in their home!
So I’ve done my fair share of theater. I have also been very fortunate in that I’ve been able to come to New York two or three times a year just to see as many shows as possible. I think the live theater culture here is incredible.
Theater in Chicago will always be my first love. It started careers for me and about 50 of my friends. We all love coming back. As soon as the TV show is over, I’ll be back in Chicago, doing live theater.
I first got involved in theater in 1968, at the height of a social tumult. I was a poet.
The thing with film and theater is that you always know the story so you can play certain cues in each scene with the knowledge that you know where the story’s going to end and how it’s going to go. But on television nobody knows what’s going to happen, even the writers.
Well, all I can say is thank goodness I had 15 years of theater before ever I did film roles. You build technique that you can rely on.
I’ve always been kind of precocious, but my journey sort of solidified when I was in college and majored in theater. That’s how I knew I wanted to spend my life writing, telling, and performing stories.
I didn’t do a movie until I was almost 30. I’m grateful for that because it gave me a chance to be an adult in the world and do work in the regional theater that very few people cared about. I loved it and I wanted to do that stuff.
I’ve just taken the decision that I’m going to now go full time back into the theater.
If I had a gun to my head and I had to choose between theater and film I’d choose theater.
Every night, you fight for that standing ovation at the end of the night. And if you do something wrong, the domino effect is chaotic. And you must not allow yourself to make mistakes whatsoever. So in that case, theater, it’s fascinating because of the discipline that you need.
I find it soothing, the thought of a movie theater.
Normally our season is seven weeks in the Drama Theatre and four weeks in the Opera Theater.
I love theater. I grew up doing theater.
From a young age, I had done a lot of theater and musical theater. I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do with my life, but every time I was away from acting, I just felt very incomplete and a little stir crazy.
We can guess that the unacceptable conduct of the soldiers at Abu Ghraib resulted in part from the dangerous state of affairs on the ground in a theater of war.
I’m a kid that went to theater school. I thought I was going to be making my living doing plays regionally or in New York or on Broadway, and maybe if I got lucky I would do a movie here or there.
