I went to a college in New York called New Paltz. I studied theater there for four years. I also studied privately in NYC with a teacher named Robert X. Modica.

Encouragement from my high school teacher Patty Hart said 'you need to focus and theater might be your route out of here.' I created the program went to college and graduate school and now here I am.

I was 20 years old working as a roofer and a telemarketer and driving a taxi just barely getting by. A friend of a friend suggested I try acting. I was like 'Why? What am I going to do? Community theater?' But I took a class and the teacher thought that I had potential so I moved to Vancouver and started auditioning.

I had a great drama teacher in high school and that's when I started to learn about the history of theater.

I was raised in New York City and raised in the New York City theater world. My father was a theater director and an acting teacher and it was not uncommon for me to have long discussions about the method and what the various different processes were to finding a character and exploring character and realizing that character.

I came from a family where I felt great pressure to be financially successful and I felt that staying in Chicago and doing theater I was in all likelihood not going to find financial success.

The kind of theater that I do is sort of 'narrative realism ' which I think in the broadest sense is legitimate to say is mainstream. I mean in a certain sense Suzan-Lori's plays have had mainstream levels of success. But Suzan-Lori is in some ways not a narrative realist.

My college degree was in theater. But the real reason if I have any success in that milieu so to speak is because I spent a lot of years directing I spent a lot of years behind the camera.

My strength as an actor is in the theater - I know that about myself. Some actors get onstage and vanish but I'm much better there than I am on screen.

I'm not a huge fan of improv theater or improv sports or whatever because it still just looks like a tool. It looks like a technique to me.

I was a huge theater geek growing up and that was not the easiest thing in the world especially growing up in Chicago where sports are really the norm. I was always off to the theater at night from 7 years old on. Friends there in the Midwest who could talk to you about the idiosyncrasies of 'Pippin' were few and far between.

Boxing has become America's tragic theater.

My main concern is theater and theater does not reflect or mirror society. It has been stingy and selfish and it has to do better.

I smile so much at the theater my face hurts when I leave.

Now I'll read anytime anywhere. I love reading in front of the space heater. Isn't that a sad confession? But it's like my substitute for the roaring fireplace of yore.

I'm the first one who sees every romantic comedy in theaters.

I have so much respect for people in the theater. You can't do 10 or 15 takes. It's all live. It's like life in motion.

I would be a terrible person to be in a relationship with because I'm either sleeping or at the theater.

My relationship with Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm reaches far back into my childhood. I grew up with Grimm's fairy tales. I even saw a theater production of 'Tom Thumb' during Advent at the State Theater in Danzig which my mother took me to see.

Kids now are so used to surround sound and the power in theater speakers that the concert hall is a disappointment to them.

People who are powerless make an open theater of violence.

Theater and poetry were what helped people stay alive and want to go on living.

Theater is far superior to film in poetry in abstract poetry.

There's a kind of dynamic quality about theater and that dynamic quality expresses itself in relation to first of all the environment in which it's being staged then the audience the nature of the audience the quality of the audience.