I learned more about who I am and how to be a great worker - and a great artistic worker - from doing student theater. I was a stage manager. I was an assistant stage manager. I was on the running crew. I did probably 25 shows at Northwestern - all musicals, of course.
The reason I was in most of the movies I've done is that they paid for me to be in the theater.
The first perk of theater is the girls.
I've been doing my big theater projects, which take years, and writing a song here and there.
We do a lot of shows for young people who have probably never been to the theater before and they are learning about the Holocaust, which unhappily, many of them do not know about.
I've always loved film, and since I knew I probably couldn't be a cowboy or a spy in real life, I thought I'd play one in a movie! I started doing theater in middle school and tested for 'Victorious' before being in an episode of 'iCarly.'
I was preparing myself for the theater, and... I got a little job here and a job there, but it wasn't going well, and I considered some time before the mid-60s that maybe I should consider something else.
I'm always struck by the kids who turn up in New York and LA, and places in between. Chicago. Wanting to do theater, wanting to do independent film. Wanting to break into television or radio.
I think that classical theater training is just one aspect of acting. I think that experience of having worked with a lot of text can help you as an actor. It gives you the ability to tackle a larger than life character in parts that require it.
I've worked for 27 years nonstop in theater and films. That's a lot of work.
I went to college at San Francisco State and supported myself working the graveyard shift at a brewery and did a little theater. It was great. I'd do Shakespeare and stuff like that.
There was no way to lock down, or tighten up, or Fail-Safe into Security Theater a race that covers 26.2 miles, a race that travels from town to town, a race that travels past people's houses. There was no way to garrison the Boston Marathon. Now there will be.
A musical, like most religions, provides the audience or followers with a sense of belonging. Religious services, on the other hand, with their staged performances, invigorating songs, popular wisdom and shared experience, are almost a form of community theater.
I've sort of left the theater just for little shoots here and there - little one-off series or small roles in films or whatever.
I just want to keep writing characters who are interesting and complicated people and interesting roles for women, in TV or film or in theater. I think that's like my 'Blues Brothers' mission.
Socrates didn't care to visit the theater, as a rule, except when the plays of Euripides (which some think, he himself had helped to compose), were performed.
We were raised without movies, theater or music. We had only nature, the hills, the trees. When I got on the set of 'Manon,' I wasn't star-struck because I didn't know what a star was.
It was very natural for me to want to disappear into dark theater, I am really very shy. That is something that people never seem to fully grasp because, when you are an actor, you are meant to be an exhibitionist.
I always thought moving to New York would mean starting over in theater, because I had great work in Chicago and didn't want to become a waitress here.
Now why should the cinema follow the forms of theater and painting rather than the methodology of language, which allows wholly new concepts of ideas to arise from the combination of two concrete denotations of two concrete objects?
What's missing in the musical theater is producers willing to nurture new work, raise the money and put it on.
Theater definitely prepared me for Cyborg in the best way possible. All of the green screen definitely takes me to my minimalist theater days.
I choose parts because I don't want to be embarrassed when the movie comes out. What if my friends were to see the movie? What if my niece or nephew wandered into the theater and saw the movie? I don't want to be too ashamed of it.
I have little routines in the theater. Once I've established something, like the order of putting on makeup and a costume, I have to invariably do it in the same order every time, even if I only did it by chance the first time round.
If something seems like a little venue, don't treat it like that. Do it all. If you're sort of wondering why you're doing something at some location, just do it - any size theater, production, or whatever. It's all helpful.
I had been doing all my school plays, elementary school, middle school, and high school, and then summer. I'd wanted to act for a long time, and I thought I was going to go to college and do theater, go that route. But 'Superbad' kind of fell on my lap. I was very, very lucky for that.
I love working in the theater.
The god of theater laughs in your face at planning. You can't plan as an actor; there's no way, because so much of it is dependent on other people's choices and decisions that you're at the whim of fate, really.
It's one of the functions of the theater to shock and titillate and appall, apart from entertain and delight.
I love making people laugh. It's an addiction and it's probably dysfunctional, but I am addicted to it and there's no greater pleasure for me than sitting in a theater and feeling a lot of people losing control of themselves.
I wouldn't say anything I ever did in film would be something I'd use the word proud about. I've done better work in the theater.
Our only competition in the theater is boredom, because if I'm bored with a play, if I'm revolted by a play on stage, with the Broadway prices, especially today, I'm going to walk out and not come back and pay that price again.
I gained a great deal from the period during which I worked in theater and I value those things a great deal.
They would have been very let down if they had to leave the theater and he had missed. He would feel badly. Everyone would feel badly. But he never let them down.
Now, when I started my theater, the modus operandi was having the actors stare right into the audience.
I was taking electives, and that branched into theater. Theater led to me taking a break during the summer between my junior and senior year. After I graduated, I ended up moving out to L.A. But in my senior year, I made it a part of my major.
