When you're a freelance director, you are hired to create the art, and it kind of stops there.

Im always interested in looking - historically - at how theater can animate history and how all of that can make us engage with our lives in an enriching way.

The musical theater is a glorious and distinctly American innovation in the history of theater.

For me, the reason why people go to a mountaintop or go to the edge of the ocean is to look at something larger than themselves. That feeling of awe, of going to a cathedral, it's all about feeling lost in something bigger than oneself. To me, that's the definition of spectacle.

Creativity and the world of the imagination - the beauty of what we see as a child and the kind of play that we experience as a child - can be a way for us to survive tough times.

I've gotten to the point that I don't even know what tomorrow brings. When I'm teaching, obviously I'm in town for the class every week.

I had to drop a boulder to wake people up about the A.R.T. We've done that, and now we have audiences again who want cutting-edge work, who want to be challenged, but who also won't be falling asleep at the theater.