I always loved acting and improv and sketch comedy and theater, which I did at a local youth theater.
For me, my 20s were all about reaching for the brass ring of work in theater, television, and film, surviving in between by waiting tables, painting houses, serving coffee, and temping.
I’ve always really liked theater. It fascinated me. You can create a reality and get people involved in that reality. It takes place in real time.
My theater is slow and calm, yet my life is fast and hectic, going in all directions.
And at NYU, I went to the Atlantic Theater Company, and they have two main points. One of them is to always be active in something instead of just feeling it. And the other is figuring out your character.
They would have been very let down if they had to leave the theater and he had missed. He would feel badly. Everyone would feel badly. But he never let them down.
My love for the theater has always been a priority. That hasn’t changed. I got into acting that way. The film work that came up was really a surprise.
I thought movies were handed down by God. I knew that theater was made by people because I saw the people in front of me, but movies seemed like they were delivered, wholly made, from Zeus’s head or something.
My choices in projects have all been character or role-based, and on a financial level, it’s obvious: as an actor on a TV series, I get a wonderful paycheck, and a consistent paycheck, which doesn’t always happen when you’re doing theater or movies.
I had a good theater career for years. I played Hamlet when I was 22, and I’ve played some really great roles.
The Lord Chamberlin was censoring scripts when I first came into the theater.
With my good friend Rob Penny, I founded the Black Horizons Theater in Pittsburgh with the idea of using the theater to politicize the community or, as we said in those days, to raise the consciousness of the people.
So long as there is one pretty girl left on the stage, the professional undertakers may hold up their burial of the theater.
I love theater work because of the immediate effect your performance has on the audience. And I love the repetition; I love getting on the same stage for more than a month and reciting the same lines, trying to make a small or large step towards an improvement in my acting.
I did theater for 15 years, and I spent a lot of time as an understudy.
I knew what it was to be uncomfortable in a movie theater watching unfolding on the screen images of myself – not me, but black people – that were uncomfortable.
Live theater is my favorite of all the mediums that I have worked in, so I have every intention on coming back to Broadway.
The difference – the fundamental difference between theater acting and film acting is that film acting is disjunctive.
Boxing has become America’s tragic theater.
In musical theater you have to be very big and very animated, while film and television are more toned down.
I really would rather have gone to New York, since all my training had been in theater, but I didn’t have the guts to go there alone. I knew only one person in New York, and that was a man. What I needed was a woman. That’s the way Southern girls thought.
I had an interest, for as long as I could remember, in theater.
I worked with the Groundlings, doing sketch comedy and improv at a theater here in L.A. It was my hobby, but I took classes and stayed passionate about it because it’s what I wanted to do. It just fit. It takes a while before you can actually make money at it. I worked for years.
I acted when I was young, but at 19, I had my own theater company where I acted but also directed. I also did some theater in Los Angeles. So I was always wanting to direct, even before I became an established actor.
I used to do lots of independent films and for a while I was very content living in New York City and doing independent movies and off-Broadway theater. I loved it, I had a really good time doing that, and I worked on a lot of projects that are very dear to my heart, both plays and films.
Most of my career up until the last couple of years has basically been a training ground for me. Actors that came up in the ’50s and ’60s, they had the theater, and television was in its infancy.
An acting assistant stage manager in a theater in Canterbury, a rep theater. A small wage but just enough to get by on, and I made props and I walked on, and I changed scenery, and I realized that I just loved it.
Sometimes you can fall into bad habits on film or rest on your laurels, and you can’t do that in theater. I think it’s such a useful tool as a person and as an actor to go back and forth between those two mediums.
I learned about life before I went into the theater, which is why I’ve been so happy. I was a soldier.
There was no professional theater in Cork, but still I did a lot of performing.
The only way to see a movie is in a big theater, on a big screen, with a big bag of popcorn.
I love working in New York theater.
You come in off the street, through the doors of the theater. You sit down. The lights go down and the curtain goes up. And you’re in another world.
I’ve been doing musical theater since I was a kid. And look for a CD from me in the future. I want to write all the songs!
The theater is who I am – it’s where I feel the most inspired, the most at home, the most useful.
When your father directed your mother in ‘Orpheus Descending,’ the kid’s going to be a theater nerd.
I think now that the great thing is not so much the formulation of an answer for myself, for the theater, or the play-but rather the most accurate possible statement of the problem.
I used to say when I was working in the theater that if I ever had five seasons of a hit TV show I’d never have to worry about money and wouldn’t have to do anything I didn’t want to do.
When you’re on TV, you come into people’s homes. In theater and film, they go to you – to the temple of the cinema or theater. And it’s very different.
Well, first of all I’ll say that I come alive best in theater.
I was probably never going to get to do the kind of things dramatically that I really wanted to do, so I returned to theater from time to time, and to write, and produce. It’s by no means sour grapes.
Theater has always been most important to my psyche.
I have a theater company that I’m a part of, Colt Coeur, and they do some really rad projects.
You can’t show a four-hour movie in a theater, really.
I work constantly but I work at a lot of different things. You know, I run a theater company in New York, I direct plays, act in plays, in movies, so I try to keep it eclectic.
Wouldn’t it be grand if we thought that theater could have that impact on the political life of a country?
As soon as white folks say a play’s good, the theater is jammed with blacks and whites.
Failure in the theater is more dramatic and uglier than any other form of writing. It costs so much, you feel so guilty.
I’m the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.
We knew all along we were making a good show, so its success was not a surprise to me. What has surprised me is the magnitude of this show’s success. More people see me now in one episode than saw me in 20 years of movies and theater!
When I was in New York after I left the Army, I studied for two years at the American Theater Wing, studied acting, which involved dance and fencing and speech classes and history of theater, all that.
What’s great in theater is that you can sustain the arc of a character for a full three hours, whereas in film or TV, you have to create that arc in little pieces, and usually out of sequence.
For me to want to be an actor was an improbable idea. I wasn’t beautiful or pretty in any conventional way. I wasn’t an ingenue at 22. But I was always certain of it and certain of its power. I felt the power when I went to the theater at 9, 10, 12 and 14.
