Without the laughs, the audience wouldn't be there at all, so in that sense, yes, I am a comedian.
The difference between a theatre with and without an audience is enormous. There is a palpable, critical energy created by the presence of the audience.
If they're working in a workshop somewhere, where there is, let's say, uh... only twenty people, or something like that, that's still, when they work and do a scene, that's still working in front of somebody.
In theatre, previews are the first draft of a show. I strongly believe that. The only way we can truly tell whether that draft works is by having an audience present.
The number of choices you make in the event that you see on stage, those choices are sometimes largely determined by the rehearsal process and the experiments that you go through and the choices that you make in the rehearsal room, not in front of an audience.
Though I acted in hundreds of productions, appeared at the Guthrie Theatre and on Broadway in Amadeus, I discovered in my thirties that I didn't really like stage acting. The presence of the audience, the eight shows a week and the possibility of a long run were all unnatural to me.
I'd rather play in front of a full house than an empty crowd.
I always wanted it to be multi-cam from the beginning. In the first seeds of the idea, I wanted a live audience, multi-cam show. That was very important for me.
