I love being funny! I started in the theater when I was 9 and, believe it or not, always played the funny part!
I never did theater. I was a theater major at USC my first year because I didn't get into the film school. I was biding my time, hoping to be accepted to film school, and I ended up transferring to UCLA my sophomore year.
When people go to the theater, people say they want something different, but what they really want is something the same with slight permutations. To really not know what is going to happen next is a hard thing.
Theater was definitely part of my roots. My father would take me to plays, and then my mother was always on the lookout for other talent and taking me to see plays. I saw Frank Langella in 'Dracula'... Great, great performances. I was a theater rat, hanging out backstage.
I think it's just important to be always bouncing between TV and theater, and hopefully I'll get to do movies at some point.
I've sat in the theater for thousands and thousands of shows.
The Sherry Theater, which I named after my mom, is a place I can go. I do want to give back to the community. There are so many people out there who want to be seen and heard, and get connected.
I have a theater company that I'm a part of, Colt Coeur, and they do some really rad projects.
I trained in theater. I loved Los Angeles, but I've found New York to be successful for me.
I went to school in the 1970s, and there was a lot of physical theater in those days.
Theater is so precious about each word - not that it's a bad thing, but you definitely never stray from the script.
When I started in the theater, I'd do plays by Shakespeare or Ibsen or Chekhov, and they all created great women's roles.
I went to University of Victoria on Vancouver Island and their theater program.
I did some theater as a kid for fun. But it was really by chance that I landed into acting.
Pretty much from 1979 through 1988, the backbone of my career was the theater. Working on Broadway a couple of times, working off-Broadway, and also doing a lot of regional theater. Make no mistake, I lived very frugally. I had an apartment that was real cheap. I would get two or three jobs per season, and in between I'd be on unemployment.
You can manipulate the viewer in film. With theater, what you see is what you get.
Many movie stars or American Idol contestants sort of fall into theater... and say, 'Oh, yeah, I would love to do theater.' And then they get here and say, 'Oh, wait a minute, this actually is a craft!' It's not just show up one day and do it. It's show up eight times a week, twice on Wednesdays and twice on Saturdays.
Picture-taking is an ensemble art - like theater.
As someone who's been doing a lot of classical theater recently, I loved the idea of getting to run around in Steven Alan, and not be in a corset and a wig, and not have a dialect, and get to be in a 90-minute play with no intermission, and get to do real comedy.
I've done some TV and I've done a lot of theater, obviously, and the last character I played on Broadway was a very fast-talking broad. I'm used to learning material and words.
If you do television, and it's great, it's the best job there is. Every week it's another opportunity to really make that work and figure out how to make it work better. I love that it's like theater too, and the audience, and it's so short, like twenty minutes... It's like a Haiku or something.
I had always done theater in extracurricular ways. I'd never been a drama major.
Anytime somebody tells me they saw 'Safety Not Guaranteed' in the theater, my answer is, 'That was you?'
The Majestic Theater in 1990. That was one of my first real shows where I had 300 to 400 people there.
There is probably some great acting that goes on in movies from people who have never been on a stage, but if you are in for the long haul, you'd be missing an enormous part of what being an actor is if you're not part of theater.
I want to do work that means something to me so that when I go to work at the theater eight times a week, I want to be there.
I love the smell of a theater. The old rooms and the carpet and all that stuff. I love to tell stories. Even before I was doing music, I saw myself as a director. So most of my songs come in a play form, you know, where there are characters and stories, so I like to go beyond just the song sometimes.
After school, I was planning to jump from regional theater to regional theater.
Poindexter was a part that's in the children's theater side of me, that character actor side of me. It's probably my favorite role because nobody will let me play that anymore.
I get very excited when I go to a show - there are all these people who don't know each another who've come together to celebrate this amazing ritual. The making of community that theater provides is quite profound.
The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.
I love getting back to Wivenhoe. I get out of my wig, bustle and costume in three minutes flat at the end of the play before jumping into a taxi outside the theater and catching the train home.
Now, all of a sudden, every college and every university has an opera theater. Every little city has its little group.
I knew early on that I was a nerd and that films were my refuge. Those first few minutes before the lights went off, and you're alone in the theater waiting, were really pleasurable.
I enjoy that with theater, you can just go into a room with a paper bag lunch: there're no cables, no electricity. It's the purest experience.
What's happening to movie critics is no different from what has been meted out to book, dance, theater, and fine-arts reviewers and reporters in the cultural deforestation that has driven refugees into the diffuse clatter of the Internet and Twitter, where some adapt and thrive - such as Roger Ebert - while others disappear without a twinkle.
