Quote

The play is a marvelous form, but it demands less than a novel.

There's nothing like a play. It's so immediate and every performance is different. As an actor, you have the most control over what the audience is seeing.

It's hard to write a good play because it's hard to structure a plot. If you can think of it off the top of your head, so can the audience.

A good play puts the audience through a certain ordeal.

A play, after all, is a mystery. There's no narration. And as soon as there's no narration, it's open to interpretation. It must be interpreted. You don't have a choice... Each play can become many things.

But I find with Francis Bacon, some of the things were in the place, and someone who was connected with these schools of thought, and someone who had a motivation that equals the scope of the comedy and the tragedy in the plays.

Always when I directed the play, I was always trying to cast people not who were necessarily like the characters, but people who I felt had the essential component that the character had, some kind of soul for it.

I come from a tradition where the writer writes a play for the actors, rather than for himself, and the dialogue is made to work onstage, so it needs actors to help shape it. So you never get a play right straightaway.

I'm one of those lazy actors; I like to take what the playwright wrote and work with that.

I'm doing this play right now, the new David Mamet play. It's called 'Race,' and it's very interesting how people really leave the theater filled with the desire to talk about the play and the issues and the characters, and how they're all navigating their personal views around race.