I don't put pressure on myself. When I put pressure on myself, then I just play bad. When I play bad, my team plays bad.
The thing that is always so surprising about plays written in another century is how remarkably elastic they are. When you listen to the way in which Shakespeare attacks relationships, for example, even though the words may start off sounding foreign, in actuality they are so accessible, the motivations so clear, the resonances so contemporary. When you put it in a modern context - we could well be in a place with someone like Gaddafi or Mubarak - it becomes apparent how Richard III resonates with that type of personality, with media and manipulation, alliances and petty jealousies.
Mac Rebennack, better known as Dr. John, once told me that when a brass band plays at a small club back up in one of the neighborhoods, it’s as if the audience—dancing, singing to the refrains, laughing—is part of the band.
You can run a lot of plays when your X is twice as big as the other guys' O. It makes your X's and O's pretty good.
I've had trouble with criticism, I guess. It's hard to know what role criticism plays in either encouraging poets or in getting other people to read them.
My husband is a composer, so he plays piano all the time and I sit there and clap telling my unborn child, 'Hear me clap, hear the music. ' I know music, in general, is supposed to be good for babies to hear.
I'm sensitive about the criticism [for not producing new playwrights], yes. But I'm hip to it as well. I read 500 new plays a year, and 99. 99 percent of them are not good. I see no reason to do a new play just because it's new. It's like kissing your sister, a virtue, but so what? It seems to me more worthwhile to take a proven playwright and say, Write something for us.
All plays stem from personal experience. I was reading psychoanalytic lit for a couple of years, obsessively, in depth, and I got involved in analyzing everyone around me. . . . Eventually, all my friends' eyes began to glaze over when I started talking this way, and I got the hint that there might be something comical in it.
When I was in college, I was in the theater department, which for anyone who has been involved in any kind of theater program, you know that it's really wacky and tight-knit, a real family. Me and my good friends from college would do random shows and plays that were sometimes serious, but most of the time really goofy and funny.
I'm not saying that Sam J. Jones was Flash Gordon - there's no such thing. No actor can be the person, that's a bunch of crap. People pay to see an actor be himself, whether he plays Hamlet or whatever.
I've done choir since I was tiny, and I've always tried to get into plays. They all just meshed together. Now with my career, especially with music, people are like, "Which one do you pick?" I don't pick either. They're just different expressions of who I am.
I work constantly but I work at a lot of different things. You know, I run a theater company in New York, I direct plays, act in plays, in movies, so I try to keep it eclectic.
It is the best feeling in the world to have a close game come down to just a couple of plays and you are able to do it.
Everyone of us plays 'tapes' from our parents until we die. That's why it's so important to talk good values to your child
China is both an adversary, but also a potential partner in the international community if it's following the rules. So my attitude coming into office was that we are going to insist that China plays by the same rules as everybody else.
He who climbeth on the highest mountains, laugheth at all tragic plays and tragic realities.
Literate households in the 17th century would have had the Bible, John Bunyan's "The Pilgrim's Progress," and a couple of other books. Shakespeare plays were cheap, so you could buy those, but a folio cost a pound, which was an incredible amount of money then.
I've been calling plays in the huddle since I was seven.
I think a lot of the way that I try to write my stories come from watching my mom write plays and trying to do that.
An actor uses his body as a tool and an instrument. In the same way a musician plays an instrument, the actor uses his body to convey feeling and emotion. An animator uses a pencil or a computer to create the same thing, the same exact way. . . An actor is taking words that are not his own, and he has to bring some kind of authentic life to those words. It's the same goal, to create this authentic life. Even if it's a drawing, or if it's a cartoon, you're still trying to create authenticity because, if the character emotes authentically, it has a power to connect with the audience.