There's all that brain work involved, remembering all those lines in a script. I find I have to eat a lot of fish, late - but not too late - in the afternoon. Doing theatre, you need to be like an athlete in training.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
With acting, when you're reading a script, you're regurgitating someone else's words. There's a whole part of your brain that's off duty.
Theater is a physical activity as much as anything. It's harder for me to learn the lines than it was 30 years ago. At the same time, I'll never quit working in the theater - until I can't memorize two lines back to back.
With a theatre audience there's always the additional sense of a sustained challenge of which I'm acutely aware and for which you need to have the tools ready - your voice, physicality, brain.
The reason why I hate working in theatre is the tedium of memorisation. But once that is done, then you feast on this never-ending meal. If you play it correctly, every night is fraught with very high stakes that are very difficult to find in everyday life.
I don't like to intellectualize about my acting. I don't sit around and study the pages of a script over and over again.
When I'm doing theatre, I feel like my life's on hold. Even though you might go out for a coffee, or go and see a film, your brain is still there, pulling you back to it.
The thing about theater that always and still kind of makes me edgy is that you work and work and work and work, and then you're just in performance mode, and then you have to just be on; the work is done, and then you just have to do it over and over again, so you're just constantly at that performance level.
Your mind just goes to the craziest idea to lure people into the theater, and then you write your script around those elements.
With all the lines I have to learn for TV scripts, I don't think I have any problems with forgetfulness - that's brain exercise enough for me.
The thing that sticks to me most about theater is that because it's such an ape crazy nonstop experience, you really don't have time to think about anything else. You're just really present; you have to be, or else, you know, you can't stop the play.