A Quote by Taissa Farmiga

I really didn't know much about theater. After I signed on, I started reading a lot of Sam Shepard plays just to brush up on my history and do some research. — © Taissa Farmiga
I really didn't know much about theater. After I signed on, I started reading a lot of Sam Shepard plays just to brush up on my history and do some research.
I don't have much to compare it to because I really didn't know much about theater. After I signed on, I started reading a lot of Sam Shepard plays just to brush up on my history and do some research. What's great is that Sam's been here and he's been in rehearsals with us. Sometimes you don't even notice him come in; he's just sitting there in the theater seats watching you.
Sam Shepard is - I didn't tell this to Sammy, but if I had to point to one artist that made me want to do this for my life, it's Sam Shepard.
I started out wanting to be an actress. My sister was in this theater company in Brooklyn. I saw her in some plays, and I was immediately obsessed. I started auditioning for plays when I was about 10.
I was trained in the repertory theater. You would do Moliere one night and Sam Shepard the next.
I went to drama school at NYU for serious acting. So I was doing Chekov and Sam Shepard plays.
I've worked with some of the best of them. Not just directors like Sam Peckinpah and David Lynch, but writers like Sam Shepard and singers like Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson.
I designed a theater magazine that was full of plays and essays about the theater, and then I worked at a theater school. By osmosis or something, I was learning from reading plays and not being analytical about them, but when I would read them, the joy in me was mostly from imagining them in my head and visualizing them.
Patrick started driving really fast, and just before we got to the tunnel. Sam stood up, and the wind turned her dress into ocean waves. When we hit the tunnel, all the sound got scooped up into a vacuum, and it was replaced by a song on the tape player. A beautiful song called “Landslide.” When we got out of the tunnel, Sam screamed this really fun scream, and there it was. Downtown. Lights on buildings and everything that makes you wonder. Sam sat down and started laughing. Patrick started laughing. I started laughing. And in that moment, I swear we were infinite.
As a kid, I was really into performing. I would do choruses, I would do musicals, whatever it was. And then, as a teenager, I got into an acting class at SUNY Purchase for gifted kids, and that really turned me on to material beyond musicals, Sam Shepard, and Christopher Durang plays.
I used to go with my parents and loved it, I was in school plays, and I started reading plays before I started reading novels. I'll defend it to the hilt. When theatre is good it is fabulous.
I actually didn't really start to get into the research of film until I was much older. I decided I wanted to direct a lot earlier than I started to do the research, which is really strange, but it is the case.
The truth is that a lot of plays aren't political at all. In American theater history, political theater has tended to crop up when there's a crisis, a national crisis.
I grew up in Cleveland and started doing plays in high school. And I went to the University of Illinois, and I majored in drama. And after school, I went up to Chicago, because I didn't really know anybody in New York or Los Angeles, and I knew people who were doing plays in Chicago.
I was always drawn to performing, but I never thought I could. I have no idea what I wanted to do outside of the old cowboy-or-fireman. When I was in college, I got serious about acting. I started examining history and then everything related to the theater. History, art, all the other studies, if I could link them into the theater, then it became alive for me. It just opened up my eyes.
I spent a lot of my time, growing up, at the Beck Center. I'd be in plays there, and I'd get there an hour or two early just so I could be there, where I felt safe and where I belonged. And that's such an important feeling to have as a young kid. The theater community, and especially the Beck Center, really embraced me and got me started.
If you really want to be part of something and you have that much passion towards it, you'll know enough to research it and find the history of it; and history is so important, history is everything.
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