I keep coming back to it, over and over - adultery and cheating. It's the most interesting problem in the theater. How else do you get Oedipus? That's the first cheating in the theater.
I'm a sort of political person, and I feel that there's a kind of ineradicably political dimension to theater, to all theater, whether it's overtly political or not.
We used to play in a theater club in London called The King's Head. When the theater let nut, around 10:00 P.M., we'd be ready to go and really get it on for about an hour or so.
I'd taken some classes at UCB in New York and again at the Magnet Theater and the PIT Theater. I definitely never advanced to where I was on a team or anything like that.
I did enjoy theater. I actually do prefer making films and television, but it was a learning experience for me, because I got into television at 5 and film at 11, and theater was something I completely bypassed.
Although I performed in high school, my first real experience with theater was performing with a student-run organization at Vanderbilt University called The Original Cast where I learned that I loved performing and especially loved theater people.
I love TV now, and 'Modern Family,' but what draws me back to theater is that initial instinct of wanting to be a theater actor. I love the challenge of starting a play and not stopping until you finish. I love the immediacy of trusting your instinct...
Thinking back on it, I've been in this business since I was 3, and I grew up in musical theater, so I was raised and surrounded by gay men and gay women. I was hardly around anyone straight.
When I was in New York after I left the Army, I studied for two years at the American Theater Wing, studied acting, which involved dance and fencing and speech classes and history of theater, all that.
Before I ever acted as an amateur - which I did a great deal at school and at university - I used to go to the theater with my parents in the north of England, where I was born and brought up... Theater of all sorts.
I became an actor by doing school plays and youth theaters, and then National Youth Theatre of Great Britain. And then I did study at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. For me that was a good way to enter the field, to work in the theater...
I'm a weird dichotomy of nerd, sports fan, and musical theater, so I'd love to do a superhero musical on Broadway. But all the good superheroes are claimed.
I love singing! I was a musical theater girl in high school. We were always singing and dancing around, and just doing little community theaters and high school musicals. Then, when I got to NYU, I focused more on drama.
I remember when I saw 'The Matrix' when I was 13, I saw it in the theaters, and I was so blown away by it. It was one of the most memorable experiences I definitely ever had in the theater.
I've always sung. I was really into musical theater when I was growing up. As a kid, I listened to Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone, actually, on cassette tapes.
I wanted to be a theater actress, but I thought it would be easier to get to New York and the theater if I had a name than if I just walked the streets as a little girl from California.
In Michigan, if you want to act, it's local theater, it's high school theater and it's going to camp and putting on plays in the summer, and I always loved doing that. There was something that just drew me to it.
I was a musical theater major at the University of Arizona. And I primarily trained with Marsha Bagwell. It was a classical program, so we did Chekov and Moliere and a lot of Shakespeare.
I've always been really artistic. I went to an all-girls' private Catholic school, and one of their biggest things was musical theater. I became obsessed with that.
Theater is a physical activity as much as anything. It's harder for me to learn the lines than it was 30 years ago. At the same time, I'll never quit working in the theater - until I can't memorize two lines back to back.
Actors and writers need to come back to the theater because it's a place where you can learn. You have to pay your dues, and people who haven't paid their dues in the theater, I think, have a hard time creating a whole career.
