I'm always interested in looking - historically - at how theater can animate history and how all of that can make us engage with our lives in an enriching way.
We're a depraved civilization. All this technology, all the computer games and the iPhones... nobody will sit for art anymore. What a dismaying state of humanity.
In Elizabethan England or classical Athens... theater was at the center of, not culture, but society and politics and religion and civic engagement. Those things have a different audience.
Theatre and opera were always the twin kingdoms that I felt I had to conquer, because they were my parents' favorites.
For me, the reason why people go to a mountaintop or go to the edge of the ocean is to look at something larger than themselves. That feeling of awe, of going to a cathedral, it's all about feeling lost in something bigger than oneself. To me, that's the definition of spectacle.
My generation of director has no illusions that we are going to be fed and cared for by subsidized theater in America.
Music is rhythm, and all theater is rhythm. It's about tempo and change and pulse, whether you're doing a verse play by Shakespeare or a musical.
Politics, to a degree, is about legislation, administration. You can't be there in the trenches.
I listen to music, I read scripts, and I know pretty intuitively if I can unlock it in a way. It's actually very liberating when you understand that not everything is for you.
