I love working with a set designer because, in many respects, you meet the set designer before you meet the actors. So it's a chance for me as a director to figure out what I'm thinking and to explore how the space is going to actually be activated.
My first play, 'The Colored Museum,' was done in '86 at the Public Theater.
Theater, at the end of the day, is about ideas. It's about very large ideas. And if the play is beautifully written or smartly written and has incredible characters you follow on the journey, you take home these larger ideas. Whether it's 'Angels in America' or 'Lucky Guy' or 'Normal Heart,' you follow this moment-to-moment journey as an audience.
You can go see ballet in its purity; you can go to a recital to hear music by itself. But what the American musical does so thrillingly is bastardize these forms into something that is exhilarating and compelling and deeply moving.
I've always tried to do shows in a filmic way. I like it when forms smack up against each other.
Anytime you create art, you create a mess. I mean, 'Hamlet' is a mess!
I'm more attracted to art that smashes than I am attracted to art that sits on a shelf and is beautiful.
You adjust what you do depending on the actor. You evolve a vocabulary and a way of language and talking with each actor.
Our lives are connected in ways we can't imagine. They're connected even before we know they're connected.
The world doesn't see a lot of gray. The world sees black and white, and then it understands.
The best of any artist is in their art.
Ultimately, theatre is about creating a sense of wonder, and I think wonder is achieved not by a kind of wide-eyed silliness but by being available to that which is most unknown, inside the material and inside yourself.
When I was little, I remember rehearsing starving so that when I got to New York I would know how to do it.
AIDS is a shared truth - it's not selective in its wrath.
I viewed black musicals before 'Jelly' as a form of cultural strip mining. The exterior remained, but all the culture that signified where the people had come from and their connection to the earth was absent.
1985 - That was my time in New York, and I have such poetic, fond memories.
I could program a 'fabulous, I love it' kind of hit season right now. I'm more interested in breaking boundaries, telling a story, defying a truth that has been accepted.
There is a strange kind of parental pride when 'Topdog' ends up on Broadway, or 'Elaine Stritch.'
You've got to make the rehearsal room very safe. You can't bully people, because if you bully people, they're going to freeze and lock up.
I love Kabuki, Noh theater and bunraku.
