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In Elizabethan England or classical Athens... theater was at the center of, not culture, but society and politics and religion and civic engagement. Those things have a different audience.

When I came to know theater, drama became valuable to me.

The myth that theater isn't for everybody is total nonsense. In the 18th and 19th centuries, everybody in America used to go to the theater all the time. The shows they went to see were big, crazy melodramas that had careening storylines and houses burning down and pretty girls in danger and comedy and death and destruction.

Everything has its own kind of theatricality and its own drama.

I believe that in a great city, or even in a small city or a village, a great theater is the outward and visible sign of an inward and probable culture.

I've always loved Victorian melodrama. And I've always liked larger-than-life theater, providing it's truthful and honest. I like what the theater can provide in energy and bombast - I enjoy it when it's large, and by that I don't mean in size, I mean in emotions. Shakespeare did that.

I've done classical theaters. I played Hamlet myself and Romeo.

The only theatre I ever saw was Shakespeare.

I grew up seeing a lot of theatre, and it was theatre that really seduced me into acting - not film or television.

I love big, bold, truthful theater - the tradition of Victorian theater.