My plays have been performed before children, workers, and peasants, and they have well understood the meaning of my theatre. What is needed for people to watch my theatre is a freshness and openness of mind.
Theatre is one of those things that children will love if they're helped to get there to see it. No child will find his or her own way to the theatre.
If we don't reach out to make theatre affordable to the young generation, we will lose them all.
I remember seeing 'Hairspray' when I was 15, and it is such a luxury to be able to see a Broadway show, and it is so hard to do if you don't live in New York - plus, it can be expensive to go to the theatre all the time, too.
Where I came from, people couldn't afford to go to the theatre.
I'm trying to bring a new generation into the musical theater and to create a new audience.
If you want more people to come to the theatre, don't put the prices at £50. You have to make theatre inclusive, and at the moment the prices are exclusive. Putting TV stars in plays just to get people in is wrong. You have to have the right people in the right parts. Stunt casting and being gimmicky does the theatre a great disservice. You have to lure people by getting them excited about a theatrical experience.
I'd like more kids to go and see theatre because it really is amazing.
It meant the world to see kids excited about theatre. That's the great thing about 'Hamilton' for me is to see young people who wouldn't normally think theatre is cool being really excited about how it works and getting involved.
I always felt like Broadway was not for me - in terms of ticket price, in terms of what was on there. I never saw myself reflected in the mirror of the Great White Way.
It's incredible how London-centric the theatre world is. Certain actors won't travel away from London anymore for work; practitioners often aren't taken seriously enough unless their work is seen in London; and it's sometimes very difficult to get national critics to review shows - especially if there's a clash with a London press night.
One of the things I did when I was in New York, which has a wonderful deaf community, is I have worked on making Broadway more accessible to deaf people.
I guess I've accepted that theatre is never going to be edgy in the way I want it to be. It's too expensive for a start. And, the audience seems to be complicit in the dullness.
Theatre is expensive to go to. I certainly felt when I was growing up that theatre wasn't for us. Theatre still has that stigma to it. A lot of people feel intimidated and underrepresented in theatre.
Virtually all my conscious life I had been involved in theatre - I had been a child actor - but as a young man who had experienced the 1960s, British theatre seemed remote from my aspirations in life - theatre was still a posh thing, a middle-class thing, something for an elite.
When I look around at Broadway and the West End, theatre is becoming an exclusive club.
Generally, the realm in which black playwrights have been allowed to achieve success has been social realism or musicals.
So many of my friends are actors, and so many of them are great, and they're losing jobs to people who have never been in plays before; I understand that sometimes I'm part of the problem. But I'm trying to figure out how to balance it.
The only thing I fear is when people say, 'I should go to the theatre more.' I say, 'We should create work that makes you not have a choice.'
I don't think people should be priced out of going to the theatre... But we have to recognise that it is a show business.
There is only one necessary condition for the emergence of a new theatre, that the stage and auditorium should be open to the masses, should be able to contain a people and the actions of a people.
I hate that people think going to the theatre is a special occasion. I wish people would treat it as normally as going to the cinema.
