I break down the tape like I'm a quality-control coach, just like I was with the Packers in 1992. I break it down by hand, every play.
Without a Prospero-Caliban relationship to balance the Prospero-Ariel one, 'The Tempest' loses much of its resonance.
When I'm doing a play like 'Betrayal,' I have to be careful not to get stimulation overload.
You're frustrated when things aren't going right. When you're out there, you have your piece of it, your view. It isn't until usually the next day when you're watching the film that you get to put all the pieces together: 'Oh, this is what happened on that play'; 'This is why I did that.' You don't totally know that game day.
There's a lot of things that go into scoring touchdowns and leading your team. It's not just the game itself, but going back and studying tape to pick apart everything I did. It's nice to have something to go on, doing it full speed in a game situation.
Wole Soyinka's 'Death and the King's Horseman' is a play I go back to and I read often.
When I see a play one time, I've got it. When I see it twice, I master it. When I see it three times, I know where the loopholes are.
Shakespeare put no children in his plays for a reason," Sir Godfrey muttered, glaring at Alf and Binnie. "You're forgetting the Little Prince," Polly reminded him. "Who he had the good sense to kill off in the second act," snapped Sir Godfrey.
I really enjoyed doing Albee's 'The Goat.' It's a powerful piece and a really exciting play to do.
A good play puts the audience through a certain ordeal.
From a child's play, we can gain understanding of how he sees and construes the world--what he would like it to be, what his concerns are, what problems are besetting him.
It was the '50s, and the card catalog and the Dewey Decimal System were in fashion. I hung out in the 812 section - American theater and plays. This is where I first read Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman' and was transfixed. I remember staring into space for what seemed an eternity after reading Linda Loman's final speech.
I've always looked to that play, 'Virginia Woolf,' for a cue - as far as any cue I might need as an actor for inspiration or as a writer.
I think in a play it's wise to just sit back and watch other actors and be able to shape it from the audience.
All the plays that have ever been written, from ancient Greece to the present day, have never really been anything but thrillers... Drama's always been realistic and there's always been a detective about... Every play's an investigation brought to a successful conclusion.
I think I started out trying to be very objective about the flow of the play.
I go to see plays all the time, and whenever I see Chekhov, I'm amazed at how this Russian play strikes home to me living 100 years later in New York City. I'm drawn to him because of his way with characters and their relationships with each other.
Take a play that you like but you think is flawed, and see if you can improve it and turn it into a musical. [...] Then make up your own story.
It takes me about a week and a half to really analyze a game - play by play.
The vast majority of people who watch baseball can properly call 95% of all plays that happen on the field. My job is to teach you how to call the other 5%.
Thoughts and feelings are suspended in a vacuum unless they instigate and feed the selected actions, and it is the characters actions which reveal the character in the play.
In the play we have the messy he-loves-her, she-loves-him, she-loves-him-too structure, and, to add even more confusion to the mix, the real love story is between the two ladies.
Well-written plays deserve to be learned from and understood properly, both by actors and audiences alike, and Rattigan's very human characters help us do that.
I'm doing this play right now, the new David Mamet play. It's called 'Race,' and it's very interesting how people really leave the theater filled with the desire to talk about the play and the issues and the characters, and how they're all navigating their personal views around race.
'A Streetcar Named Desire' is the play I've probably read the most times in my life, and I love the weirdness of all the scene outs but especially the end of the second scene, when Williams brings a tamale vendor on stage to simply say, 'Red hot!'
