A Quote by David Small

I grew up going to the theater. That was one of the nice things my mom did was she took us to plays and symphony concerts and to the museums. Theater captured my imagination. I just loved the idea of that box, which is essentially what a stage is from a certain distance, a box with all this life going on in it. So, I was eleven when I wrote my first play. Of course, it was horrible.
What's funny is my mom took me to the theater for the first time when I was six years old, and I was just amazed by it. I just said, 'Hey Mom, can I do this too?' And so she signed me up for little theater classes, and I remember my first audition for a play when I was seven years old was for 'The Thankful Elf.'
People may know me from films, but theater is my first love. I did about 35 plays before I even landed my first screen role. I'm very comfortable on stage, and theater is not something you can just wing.
I grew up in a theater family. My father was a regional theater classical repertory producer. He created Shakespeare festivals. He produced all of Shakespeare's plays, mostly in Shakespeare festivals in Ohio. One of them, the Great Lakes Theater Festival in Cleveland, is still going. So I grew up not wanting to be an actor, not wanting to go into the family business.
Plays have a celebratory nature that no other form has. Theater always meant celebration, a birthday, a reward for good grades. I felt at home in a theater. I loved being part of an audience. All the rules - the audience has to see the play on a certain date at a certain time in a certain place in a certain seat.
'Killer Joe' was originally written in 1991 and first produced in '93 at the Next Theater's Lab - a 40 seat black box theater in Evanston, Illinois - back when I was getting started. I was just 25 and I had been acting for awhile, but it was my first play and the one that really got me noticed, especially by Steppenwolf.
In Michigan, if you want to act, it's local theater, it's high school theater and it's going to camp and putting on plays in the summer, and I always loved doing that. There was something that just drew me to it.
The first seven years of my life, me, my mom and dad and my four older siblings lived in a suburb of Stockholm, and my mom was very active with directing theater. So I basically grew up at the theater on the floors of the shows, so I was really surrounded with music at a young age.
As a kid, I was fortunate that we grew up near a children's theater, with all different classes and things; so as a kid I took classes there and as I got into high school I did all the community theater stuff. Then I came to college here in New York, going to Marymount Manhattan, and studied acting there. But most of the training I got was from working. Working with really great people.
I trained in theater. And I started in theater with my first two jobs doing stage plays.
A friend of mine had his own theater company, and he jumped me in like I was in a gang. And once I came in, it was just that simple. For the first time in my life, I felt, 'This is a career, this is a life that I think I can grow old doing.' It was love at first sight. I loved being on stage and reading these plays. It was great.
I transitioned into theater and acting when I was about 9, community theater and musicals, being, like, chorus-kid-number-78 or whatever. But I just loved it. As a kid you just crave attention, and early on I just felt it was so cool and fun to play around and have people clap for me. But eventually I grew up and fell deeper into it.
[Princess Margaret] was loud, an extrovert, an exhibitionist, loved fashion, loved color, loved music, loved drama, loved the theater, wanted to be a ballerina or actress, was always the little one putting on the school plays, and [princess] Elizabeth reluctantly did it and got stage fright.
My first real acting gig was probably playing Mamillius in my mother's 'Winter's Tale.' My mom and dad are both in theater, so I grew up acting and being a little theater brat as well.
I'd always loved the theater, and I began by writing plays. I work in the theater a lot in the UK, and I've worked in the theater out here quite a bit. Everything else - the films - followed as a consequence of that.
I loved theater growing up, and my mom always took us to the touring productions that would come through town. We would go to Chicago all the time and see shows. I loved it.
It's a little scary when you - I got - I just got a box to my house for my birthday from this girl who writes - I mean it's a box of like - just like body lotions and stuff like this. And like this little box of dog toys in there. There's - you name it, candles, it's like this little box that she put together for my birthday. But she wrote in it and it came to my house.
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