theatrical engagement Quotes

I'm an actor for hire, and I go do a job.

I have noticed that in plays where the characters on stage laugh a great deal, the people out front laugh very little.

When you've always worked hard in the theatre, you find that, when you stop playing, at the end of a run, the evenings seem very long indeed. You have to find something to keep yourself occupied with because you're so used to gearing yourself up to that eight o'clock curtain, but to find any kind of real, absorbing alternative is impossible. Nobody is as interesting to spend an evening with as a really good part.

Hence the genius of having Ken steer this ship as well. You have to invest these characters with a Shakespearian quality and not in a way that might disengage the audience but in a way that actually lets you play to an audience.

It is the writer’s job to make the play interesting. It is the actor’s job to make the performance truthful.

All I've tried to do as an actor is follow the good writing. That's been my main drive. It's not always possible, so when you do come upon it, like when I came upon this, you realize pretty quickly this is something you need to be involved with.

I mean, stand up you're by yourself and it's live and when you're acting, unless you're doing a monologue, you're interacting with somebody else. Even if you're doing a monologue you're saying it to somebody and it's not live so you can do it a few times.

I wasn't a trained actor, I was trained in musical comedy theater, and when you do that, the audience is completely part of the thing. It's like Elizabethan theater. You play the scene, and then you turn - the audience is part of it.

Acting gives you cosmic permission to take a trip in movies that lasts 24 hours a day, seven days a week, until the film is finished.

I have been involved with the Roundabout for over a decade. Every once in a while, they'd give me a call to participate in a reading or offer me a show.

As a kid, I was a big reader. Books and theater were the way I understood the world, and also the way I organized my sense of morality, of how to live a good life. I would read all night. My mom would come into my room and tell me I had to go to sleep, so I would hide books under my bed. At first I had a tough time getting through novels, so I read plays, because a play is generally shorter and has all those tools for getting people hooked early on.

When I write a play, my whole intent at bottom is to get the audience to be in the cast, to get that audience on stage with the actors and to get them thoroughly involved in what's going on.

My two boys have each done a play. They've done school plays as well, but one of them did a local production of 'Waiting For Godot,' and he played the boy.