A Quote by Sanaa Lathan
I really prefer the actual experience of being onstage and living the character from beginning to end with the energy of the audience. There's nothing that beats that feeling, and yet I really have trouble with the eight shows a week.
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I guess I prefer to play live, but I don't want to have only live CDs. I like playing live because there are alot of things that can happen. I can interact with the audience and say some things to get me in trouble. On the other hand, the studio is nice because you can really take your time and make something that you know is the best thing that you can ever do. But nothing beats being up on stage in front of all that energy.
For me, being onstage for an hour and a half, my confidence was really huge for me. Doing eight shows a week for a run, I was like: "I'm actually doing this." And now I feel more confident going into something.
When I do plays in New York and do eight shows a week, you have the same feeling. Three of them are terrible, four of them are okay and one is really good. It's hard to say what accounts for the really good one or for the terrible ones, but you end up trying to remanufacture whatever worked for the good one, like eating a tomato. I ate a tomato and the show was good, but that of course is not how it works.
Being onstage is just a feeling that you cannot duplicate anywhere else because the energy that the audience is giving you forces you to give more energy. It's such an output and exchange of energy. You can't do that anywhere else.
I come from the theater. Nothing is as difficult as working eight shows a week. Period. End of story.
Though I acted in hundreds of productions, appeared at the Guthrie Theatre and on Broadway in Amadeus, I discovered in my thirties that I didn't really like stage acting. The presence of the audience, the eight shows a week and the possibility of a long run were all unnatural to me.
It took me a good eight to ten years to really formulate what I was doing onstage and start to get really personal with comedy. I always really had timing naturally, it was just about trying to figure out how that timing was going to work onstage.
I learnt a lot from my Broadway experience, it was one of the most challenging things I will probably ever have to do in my entire life, because it was eight shows a week - live singing with really hard choreography - and the spontaneity, you don't know what's going to happen.
Broadway's a lot of work, don't get me wrong. It's eight shows a week. You hardly ever see the sunset. I remember when I left, I was like, 'Oh! The sun's setting! I haven't seen that in a year!' Singing eight shows a week is hard.
What I really love is touring on a bus with my band playing shows every night and feeling the audience, feeling the presence of people actually listening to my music. Feeding my soul is what touring feels like for me and I absolutely refuse to have a bad time doing something I really, really love.
One of the things on a very practical level as an actor or actress is that when you do a play, you do the entire story every time you do it. You have eight shows a week. You have a rehearsal process of four to five to six weeks. And then once you're in performance, everybody else goes away and you're there with your fellow actors and the audience and the material and your life becomes about that. And you go through the story from the beginning to the end every time you do it and depending on how long you do it, that's where the craft comes in.
There are so many different ways to develop a character - physically, mentally, spiritually and all of that - but the research was really beautiful. I love the process of finding characters because, in the beginning, it's really unknown, and then, by the end of it, all of a sudden, you're walking and talking like that character.
You really, really, really have to love what you are going to do in theater because it is an unmerciful life. It's six days a week. It's eight performances a week. And that's doing the exact same thing over and over and over again.
Simon McBurney on "All My Sons" on Broadway - we had an eight-week rehearsal period and I really enjoyed the way that he prepared us to go onstage. It was different than anything I've done and it was a different way of being directed, so I tried to take my different experiences of these directors and give those to my actors.
I'm trying to change theater, in my own way - not just magic. I say that humbly, because I'm learning every single day. I do 15 shows a week, and every single audience I have is like a test screening for you, when you listen and go, "Really? They laughed at that?" All over the stage I have lines, written onstage, that I'm changing every single day.
I'd love to do Broadway or the West End. I'm sure doing eight shows a week is gruelling, but I did a lot of stage shows in Sydney and I love performing live.
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