Macbeth was the first play I ever read.
Wole Soyinka's 'Death and the King's Horseman' is a play I go back to and I read often.
The happiest moments for me, creatively, are doing readings of a play around a table where there's no audience.
What Lou Tyrrell creates when he has a theater is a birthing center for new plays.
Well, I'm half Australian, half English and I live in London. That is the only reason I came upon this story. My Australian mother, Meredith Hooper, was invited in late 2007 by some Australian friends to make up a token Australian audience in a tiny fringe theater play reading of an unproduced, unrehearsed play called 'The King's Speech.'
I'm always reading plays, and when I find something that I really want to do, then I'll make the time to do it.
Actually, every time I am back in New York, I read for as many plays as I can.
I read a lot of plays as a kid, but I didn't see that many plays, so I feel better-versed in film history and film structure. I just think it's easier to think in pictures.
When you read a play, the words speak to you. When you read a script, there's no way you can tell if that's the way that movie will turn out.
My earliest experience was reading Edward Albee's 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' at 8, you know, with a bunch of kids on my steps - on the stoops - and knowing that I wanted to direct them saying the lines. I don't really know how to articulate that 'cause there wasn't someone to show me.
John Cassavetes wrote A Woman Under the Influence as a play. He said, "Hey, I wrote you a play." And I said, "Great, let's read it." I read it and I said, "John, I couldn't do this every night and twice on Wednesday and Saturday".
I got fired from being a lunch-shift bartender because I had a reading of a play.
We all went to Kelsey's wedding, and yeah, we go to parties. We also go to each other's house. A group of us got together over at Kelsey's and just read through some plays just for the fun of it. That may not be everyone's idea of a good time, but we had a good time.
If I could play a game and not have to tackle, I know that I did everything right. I organized everyone the right way, read every play the right way.
In reading plays, however, it should always be remembered that any play, however great, loses much when not seen in action.
I could see no position to say, 'I'm going to make a living as a writer.' But I went to classes for it; I read every play in 'Theater' magazine. I saw the second acts of everything on Broadway - I had a job as a CBS usher in New York City, and on my way home every night, I'd see what shows I could get into.
I designed a theater magazine that was full of plays and essays about the theater, and then I worked at a theater school. By osmosis or something, I was learning from reading plays and not being analytical about them, but when I would read them, the joy in me was mostly from imagining them in my head and visualizing them.
As a young writer, I learned a lot about grammatical structure from reading plays, from performing the plays. I think that was a wonderful apprenticeship.
I really didn't know much about theater. After I signed on, I started reading a lot of Sam Shepard plays just to brush up on my history and do some research.
I went into this job to do plays, but that's here for 10 weeks, and the rest of the year I do a lot of other things-the administrative work of planning, reading plays.
