A Quote by Ken Ludwig
I would not change very much about the American theater. I marvel and rejoice in the way the country's regional theaters have formed a network that has become, in essence, our National Theater.
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I was interning at a children's theater group in Kentucky - that was my first job out of college. I had jumped around a couple of regional theaters, and I was about to go back to Maine to work at a summer Shakespeare theater there. I didn't want to just jump around the country from gig to gig. I really wanted to go to a city and get involved in a theater scene and a theater community.
I started working in New York City as an actor and did many plays. I did regional theater, smaller theaters, children's theater.
After school, I was planning to jump from regional theater to regional theater.
Theater for me is about enduring human truth. Special effects can be part of that, but when they obscure what is the reason we come to theater - to see reflections of our confounded humanity - the theater has lost its way.
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.
The first 45 or 50 years of the regional theater movement, all these folks, they built these theaters. The job of the next generation is to maintain them.
Film is very much about capturing the essence of things - if you feel it, and you've got the right person shooting it, it'll come across. Theater's a different animal; it's physically different and requires a different discipline. In the theater, you're mining the same material, constantly honing the same thing, executing it and keeping it alive and fresh.
It's not as though there aren't many, many art works and many other cultures, but there was something special about the civic nature of the Greek theater. All the citizens stopped working. They came into these theaters. It wasn't like a Broadway theater where you sit in the dark and you expect to be passively entertained. You're in this theater, amphitheater, in bright sunlight looking at your fellow citizens, recognizing their faces, and thinking with them about the future of your city. I think very few cultures have had a theatrical tradition that is quite so civic.
I knew I wanted to be an actor, and I didn't necessarily need or want to be famous or a celebrity actor. But I wanted to be somewhere where there would be no ceiling on what I could accomplish, and I felt like if I stayed in St. Louis I might have a really great regional theater career or something, but that I wasn't going to be able to get much further than that. And it felt like New York and L.A. were the two places where you could end up being a TV star or you could end up doing regional theater, which would have been fine as well.
I started doing regional theater. My first job was "The Importance of Being Earnest" at Dallas Theater Center.
I started doing regional theater. My first job was 'The Importance of Being Earnest' at Dallas Theater Center.
The Globe is a missing monument. There's no existing example of a theater from Shakespeare's time. You have Roman theaters, Greek theaters, all kinds of theaters, but none in which the plays of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and Marlowe were performed. Scholars feel that it would be of immense value to have one.
I feel like there's an obsession with pace right now in theater, with things being very fast and very witty and very loud, and I think we're all so freaked out about theater keeping audiences interested because everybody's so freaked out about theater becoming irrelevant.
Musical theater is an American genre. It started really, in America, as a combination of jazz and operetta; most of the great musical theater writers in the golden era are American. I think that to do a musical is a very American thing to me.
For me, the lean times were a wonderful, beautiful time of my life, struggling for many years in regional theater all over the country for not much money.
When you're on stage, you're playing to whoever is in the back of the room, and TV and film is so much more detailed and nuanced, but I think that's what I always wanted to do. As much as I love theater and musical theater and would love to do it again, I really love the subtleties of film and theater acting.
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