Director

I had this epiphany that I like the interaction with people. I wanted to make things happen at a grassroots level.

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.

I think every theater in America wants a younger audience... and you can't just hope to have a younger audience, you have to program things that audience is going to connect with.

I think actually what keeps the intensity manageable - it's a little counterintuitive - is that it's changing all the time. Every week is different for me.

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.

I've gotten to the point that I don't even know what tomorrow brings. When I'm teaching, obviously I'm in town for the class every week.

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.

When you're a freelance director, you are hired to create the art, and it kind of stops there.

I grew up with a beautiful gold harp sitting in our living room. My older sister played it.

My generation of director has no illusions that we are going to be fed and cared for by subsidized theater in America.

I think in our culture there's been a tendency for people to blame the audience. There is a tendency in our industry to say, 'The audience has left the building. People don't want culture anymore.'

Look at where I lived! Four blocks from Lincoln Center. I used to play in the fountain. And then I started taking dance lessons. I was in 'The Nutcracker' for the N.Y. City Ballet when I was 8 and dancing in 'The Firebird' for George Balanchine when I was 9. Believe me, that's something you don't ever forget.

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.

As a director, I never feel that I have the answers.

Politics, to a degree, is about legislation, administration. You can't be there in the trenches.

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.

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.

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.

I had to drop a boulder to wake people up about the A.R.T. We've done that, and now we have audiences again who want cutting-edge work, who want to be challenged, but who also won't be falling asleep at the theater.

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.'