I find it very invigorating having Ken Lonergan, who's an established, Pulitzer-nominated playwright doing Howards End, or Chris Hampton who's won an Oscar writing a TV series, or having an actor like Mark Rylance, who is probably England's leading theater actor, in the lead in Wolf Hall.

The theater is a communal experience, and whatever the emotional connection between an audience member and the actors onstage, it ripples through the whole audience. Part of the fun of the play is being a part of that audience.

If the play works in an emotional and engaging way purely from what's on the page, then what's on the stage will be the icing on the cake. If the play didn't work as a play on its own terms, none of the magic, none of the special effects or theatricality of it all, would add up to anything.

My principal focus is finding great dramas.

New York is obviously the capital of theater.

I think that the marketplace has changed in many dramatic ways but actually in some sense it's remained the same because the challenge of creating quality programming is the same, and I've always thought that if you follow the great material everything else will fall in to place.

You never know, until you put a play up for an audience, whether it's going to work. Things you think will work don't, and things you're not sure about work really well.