Good directors say, Here's where the play is. They stand by the heart of the matter. Some of them stand beside it.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I need to know who the audience are in any particular play. It's no good forgetting that they're there.
A good play puts the audience through a certain ordeal.
I'm not a director who feels I should be in your face all the time. I really want you to watch the actors and listen to the play.
The play is one of the very few pieces of great dramatic and comic writing that I have read in a long, long time. I was drawn to it because of the power of the writing, which gives me the actor a chance to explore many facets of myself.
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.
As an actor, you're always at the service of somebody else's vision. In a play, it's more of the director's vision, and he or she's got their hands on you all the way up to opening night, and if it's a film, there are even more people.
There is an audience for every play; it's just that sometimes it can't wait long enough to find it.
I've seen plays that are, objectively, total messes that move me in ways that their tidier brethren do not. That's the romantic mystery of great theater. Translating this ineffability into printable prose is a challenge that can never be fully met.
I can't stand interpretation. I think it's one of the great scourges of the theater. I just think, 'Don't get in the way of the play.'
Plays are not written but rewritten, and much of the rewriting takes place at the behest of the director, whose job it is to grapple with the myriad complexities of moving a play from the page to the stage.