Teaching theater, I felt very lucky. In a world where there's few options for someone who graduates with a theater degree, trying to figure out how to make rent and pay the bills, I always gravitated towards teaching jobs and things like that. I wanted to stay close to my passion as well.
I love doing theater. Despite the fact that out of theater, film, and TV, theater is the hardest thing to do. It's the least paid, and we all have these bills that we have to pay.
I'm constantly involved in theater, looking at theater, trying to do work in theater, support theater. And that's kind of my creative passion.
The greatest experience I've ever had in a movie theater was watching "Star Wars." It shaped how I look at the world. My imagination was so small before I went in that theater and there was an explosion in my head. I just couldn't figure out how someone came up with it.
In theater and dance, I was trying to win someone's approval, trying to get in, trying to be good. It felt out of my control, whereas music suddenly felt like this free expression. It was fun.
It was an outdoor Shakespeare theater that I grew up at. That feels like home, and the place I'm always trying to figure out how to get to.
I have a children's theater background, so I grew up performing for child audiences; it's sort of my specialty. I know the child audience pretty well - or felt like I did because I performed for them so much. I studied a lot about the child audience, about theater. So it was naturally a place that I gravitated to.
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.
I double majored in English education and theater with a musical theater minor. Teaching is the only thing that makes me as happy as performing.
Foreign languages, I think they are important but I don't think it should be required because-actually I think they should be teaching you English and then teaching you how to understand double talk-a politician's double talk-not teaching you how to understand French and Spanish and German, when am I going to Germany? I can't even afford to pay my rent in America, how am I going to Germany?
People are trying to figure out how to pay bills and make ends meet. They don't want to turn on the TV and say, 'What is this crap?'
I actually really liked teaching. I started teaching at UCB when I was in college. I would get someone to fill out an internship form or something so I would get the credit. But why did I start teaching? I loved it. I loved doing improv and loved UCB and wanted to be a part of that world and that community.
I know how I felt when I saw things like 'Fame' on television when I was growing up and how that was an exceptional magnet for me to want to explore the theater. I can only assume that 'Smash' is doing that for anyone who is halfway interested in theater already.
I have always wanted to work in the theater. I've always felt the glamour of being backstage and that excitement, but I've never actually done it - not since I was in 5th grade, really. But I've had many plays in my films. I feel like maybe theater is a part of my movie work.
When my mother was young, only two professions were open to women ; teaching and nursing. She chose nursing, but the teaching profession was full of talented women like her, confined there in part because they had few career options.
I see myself only sporadically as a teacher and consistently as a writer. Teaching is how I pay the bills...and fortunately, for my students, I can intellectualize about writing, and I can talk about it well, and I like to talk about it.
Trying to make certain things on the Internet totally private unless you subscribe. It's not going to work. If you can figure out how to close something down, somebody can figure out how to open it up. That's art.