Theatrical Journey Quotes

Shakespeare was the main thing I did in my life from the age of 16 when I first played 'Hamlet' at school. I then did summer stock the next summer and then went to RADA and joined the RSC and ran my own company and then worked at the Globe. That was about 30 years of my life.

Unlike Texas Rangers, we actors don't have a stop date, so I don't know about retiring. Sometimes I want to stop acting, but then you get a good script!

The magic of landing my first role on Broadway went 'poof' in a matter of a few weeks.

Acting has been my lover and best friend. My confidant and my tormentor. It has given me support and broken my heart and mended it.

[When you write a play] you walk into a forest without a knife, without a compass. But . . . if you have a sense of geography, you find that you're clearing a path and getting to the right place.

I've played so many different parts in the last 40 years.

My path was to be an actor and it’s been very good to me in life. It’s broadened my horizons and given me a lot of gifts.

I've done so many dramas in my life, and people don't even know I came from comedy.

Paul Daigneault of The SpeakEasy Stage Company in Boston gave me my Equity card playing Marta in 'Company' right before I graduated Boston University. He knew my next stop was New York. I cannot say enough good things about the SpeakEasy Stage Company.

That's what I like about acting. You don't know where you'll be in year.

In my career, I've had kind of a strange trajectory as an actor. I started out doing movies and theater and stuff, but then I had a terrible problem with stage fright as an actor on stage, and I quit stage acting for a long, long time.

I buried myself so much in the classics that I felt, "Well now, I've played all the big parts, whether badly or goodly, I don't give a damn, but at least I've played them all. Now, let's start again. Let's start the whole career again." And it makes you feel like you're beginning again, it really does.

I know what it meant to me to play the Reverend Mother, a role I've, in some ways, prepared a lifetime to do. It's why I took the part.

Every play is rhythmic control. If you want an audience to go on a journey, it's rhythmic control. You're crafting when they lean in, when they push back, when they breathe, when they surrender. It takes you probably five to six minutes to build trust with an audience. A musical you can build trust in three notes. Boom, boom, boom, you're instantly seduced. So musicals have this easy potency, but generally, in my opinion, they waste them, because a musical is incredibly hard to do.