I have to say, speaking from experience, just because an actor starts out in a role in the workshop, they won't necessarily play it when it goes to Broadway.
I trained at The Groundlings and was surrounded by some very funny women and also some very unfunny men. I didn't feel a sense of things being different because I was a girl.
We're doing a workshop over the first two weeks of December, I believe, with Graciella Daniele directing it.
I've taken so many kids out of Pittsburgh and onto the great white way in New York City right into a Broadway show.
Before 'This is Our Youth', I did a week of table reading 'Airline Highway' at Steppenwolf in Chicago while the author, Lisa D'Amour, workshopped it.
My first plays were amazingly bad, but I had a teacher who thought I had promise, and he kept working with me. I finally went to a summer workshop before my senior year with people like Sam Shepard and Maria Irene Fornes who encouraged me to write from my subconscious, and suddenly all this material about culture clash came out.
The last thing on my mind was to be an actor, but I had a crush on a cute girl in the drama department, so the best thing for me to do was audition, help out, do carpentry, whatever it took to get me on that project.
When I did musicals in London a number of years ago, I was in a workshop scenario for a year or more with 'Bombay Dreams.'
I did ballet and gymnastics, and then I started acting when I was eight - just doing amateur theater at a place called Oldham Theatre Workshop in my hometown.
