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Political theatre presents an entirely different set of problems. Sermonising has to be avoided at all cost. Objectivity is essential. The characters must be allowed to breathe their own air. The author cannot confine and constrict them to satisfy his own taste or disposition or prejudice.

In the theater there is often a tension, almost a contradiction, between the way real people would think and behave, and a kind of imposed dramaticness.

Whether you are a writer or an actor or a stage manager, you are trying to express the complications of life through a shared enterprise. That's what theatre was, always. And live performance shares that with an audience in a specific compact: the play is unfinished unless it has an audience, and they are as important as everyone else.

For an entire populace, change, growth, and spontaneity were dangerous. Acting upon a personal desire, whispering a hidden longing, revealing your true feelings - all the human actions we think of as essential to a character - had be censored by the self lest they be punished by the state.

There are certain things in which mediocrity is not to be endured, such as poetry, music, painting, public speaking.

Moderation has been called a virtue to limit the ambition of great men, and to console undistinguished people for their want of fortune and their lack of merit.

The idea that you must treat actors a certain way in order to get a performance out of them kind of disturbs me, and it's disregarding what we do. Our job is to do our job.

To survive in a profession like this, you have to have absolute discipline and commitment, and I did not quite have it for musical theater.

The primary function of a theater is not to please itself, or even to please its audience. It is to serve talent.