One is just an interpreter of what the playwright thinks, and therefore the greater the playwright, the more satisfying it is to act in the plays.
I've never been in a bad play. There might have been bad productions and I might have been bad in them, but I've never been in a play that wasn't interesting or worthwhile doing on some level.
Writing a play to get to Broadway and have a national tour is a sure way to write a terrible, terrible play.
Like I always say, it's not how many great plays you make; it's how few bad ones you make. I know fans, and even some losing coaches, are enamored with long pass completions or the great run plays, but that doesn't offset the interception or the fumble.
With my plays, when the lights go down, at least the audience isn't thinking, 'Oh, God, two more hours of this.'
I think if you can write a play, or produce a play, the first step toward success [is] if people don't want to kill themselves in the lobby. Now there must be four or five other steps, but that's the first.
A good play is a play which when acted upon the boards make an audience interested and pleased. A play that fails in this is a bad play.
I love a good play, but they're too hard to find.
As far as pedals are concerned, the test for me is if I step on it, do I seem to be playing better?
Seeing a new play in a first-time production is so exciting - when it's good, you want to shout from the rooftops.
A good many inconveniences attend playgoing in any large city, but the greatest of them is usually the play itself.
More often than not, theatre critics bubble with enthusiasm about plays that are, when all is said and done, really pretty average.
There are ways in which you can make sure that even if people come to the theatre because they know an actor or actress, by the end, they've forgotten that, and they leave going, 'Wow - what an amazing play.'
Plays by people like Martin McDonagh and Brian Friel attract huge audiences, not because they're Irish, but because they're brilliant plays.
Our only competition in the theater is boredom, because if I'm bored with a play, if I'm revolted by a play on stage, with the Broadway prices, especially today, I'm going to walk out and not come back and pay that price again.
Doing a good play on the stage is like eating a good meal at home - assuming your wife is a great cook or that she's hired a great cook.
We sat down and read it for the first time and I thanked God under my breath, because they were all so good. And my leading ladies are both exceptional. I mean, everybody in the play. I could just go on all night about them.
The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas.
Winning the Pulitzer is not that big a deal. I have seen hundreds of plays that have won the prize and you couldn't sit half way through it. The Pulitzer is a common prize that means very little.
In a good play every speech should be as fully flavored as a nut or apple.
I imagine as an axiom you could say that the better the play, the less "creativity" the director need exert.
There are times, especially when I was just getting into PC gaming, where I spent way less time playing than obsessing about the quality of the play.
Will this new play be good or bad? Nothing else matters. Nothing at all.
You don't expect me to know what to say about a play when I don't know who the author is, do you? . . . If it's by a good author, it's a good play, naturally. That stands to reason.
