It’s so immediate. It’s very exciting. The audience is there so there’s no retake. There’s no stopping and no chance to redo. You feel the audience and their response to what you’re doing. You get the energy from the audience that you don’t get in a film. Live theater is fluid. You start at the top and go all the way through. You have a seamless feeling and it’s different each night, whether it’s a long or short run. Different things happen each night. There’s a different nuance with the people you act with in each performance. It may be very subtle and very slight and the audience may not catch it, but you do.

These type of stories still go on. This is something that has to be said. It’s been done in many ways, but I think that theater being done live has a different impact. And when we come out of the show we stop and think–”What can I do in my society to make it better?”

Theater is a service where the god keeps changing…Sometimes it’s the actor. Sometimes it’s the director. Sometimes it’s the stage manager. Sometimes, but almost never, it’s the playwright.

If I could change one thing about U.S. theater, theater companies would produce a wider, broader range of plays by women and men who fully represent the cultural complexity of twenty-first century U.S. culture. Theatergoers would then have access to a huge selection of diverse theatrical worlds that would challenge, entertain, delight and intrigue them…

An audience can go back and watch a film any number of times they want. It's always there for them. For the cast and crew, the relationship with a film is more complex. The magic is in the making, and that process is a discrete unit of time in the past. You can reflect on that unit of time, you can be proud of it, but you can't revisit it.

Film and television essentially feel the same when you’re doing it, because it’s the same technical approach. All the homework is the same. The homework for each medium is all similar, but the gratification in a live theater context is much higher, because it’s immediate. It’s far more dangerous, because there are no retakes. It’s electric, it’s an actual chemical transaction that occurs between you and the audience. Whatever energy you’re throwing out to them they throw it right back to you, and it kind of feeds on itself in this vacuum…

I'm very nervous when I work in a film and very relaxed before a live audience. I like theater because it's more of an actor's medium. You can control your performance. In film you depend on the director to watch out for your ass, but in the theater you can take care of yourself.

Theatre is a terrific environment to hone your storytelling skills as well as fine tune your performance, both of which I'm very grateful for and that I use in my prep process for this medium [of television], also, when you have a live audience, they are the last member of the cast, if you will. You can rehearse a show as much as you want,a how that night will turn out until your final company member is in the house, and that's the audience.

The real thing—that’s not what you want in the theater. Illusion, magic, imagination. What should have happened, not what did. Reality doesn’t make good theater.

If you want to change something by Tuesday, theater is no good. Journalism is what does that.

But, if you want to just alter the chemistry of the moral matrix, then theater has a longer half-life.

Make them laugh, make them cry, and back to laughter. What do people go to the theater for? An emotional exercise. And no preachment.

The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life.

No, do the best you can to make the present production a success - don't spoil the entire play just because you happen to think of another one that you'd enjoy rather more.

And who’s to say where life ceases and theater begins—