Opera is the ultimate art form. It has singing and music and drama and dance and emotion and story.
In Elizabethan England or classical Athens... theater was at the center of, not culture, but society and politics and religion and civic engagement. Those things have a different audience.
For me, the reason why people go to a mountaintop or go to the edge of the ocean is to look at something larger than themselves. That feeling of awe, of going to a cathedral, it's all about feeling lost in something bigger than oneself. To me, that's the definition of spectacle.
Music is rhythm, and all theater is rhythm. It's about tempo and change and pulse, whether you're doing a verse play by Shakespeare or a musical.
You have to think about why you're asking an audience to come to the theater. It's not that they should come because it's good for them, because it's the vegetables that they should eat and the culture shot that they should get... It's about experience and building community and catalyzing dialogue and bringing people together.
Art cannot be looked at as an elite, sacred event anymore. It has to be embraced as an accessible, popular form, which is what I believe theater is at its roots.
I don't want to be in an art bubble.
I listen to music, I read scripts, and I know pretty intuitively if I can unlock it in a way. It's actually very liberating when you understand that not everything is for you.
Theatre and opera were always the twin kingdoms that I felt I had to conquer, because they were my parents' favorites.
When you're a freelance director, you are hired to create the art, and it kind of stops there.
I knew ART was was going to give me this opportunity to expand my role as a director and finally let me have a seat at the table where I could get involved in these policy discussions and producing discussions and, frankly, the financial discussions.
I'm always interested in working with people who are good team players - that are selfless that way in their interests and dedication to the project.
I'm always interested in looking - historically - at how theater can animate history and how all of that can make us engage with our lives in an enriching way.
The mission of the A.R.T. is to expand the boundaries of theater through works of the canon and the new works of tomorrow.
I'm sorry, but to ask an audience these days to invest three hours in a show requires your heroine be an understandable and fully rounded character.
We're a depraved civilization. All this technology, all the computer games and the iPhones... nobody will sit for art anymore. What a dismaying state of humanity.
It's freeing to not be caught up in your own personal baggage.
I really challenge every actor at the beginning of a process, and I always say, 'I have an idea that I'm going to bring to the table. I hope and expect that you will have an idea and bring it to the table. But the way I really want to work is that together we're going to have a third idea that is better than either of our ideas.'
I want an audience that will come sitting forward in their seats.
As a director, I never feel that I have the answers.
