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

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.

I don't want to be in an art bubble.

The idea of making audiences feel like they matter, that the theatre matters, and that they're a partner in the event—that's what fuels me as a director . . . I believe it's actually radical to think about the audience.

I had this epiphany that I like the interaction with people. I wanted to make things happen at a grassroots level.

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.

Opera is the ultimate art form. It has singing and music and drama and dance and emotion and story.