When I was working in the theater, the best actor on Broadway was Kevin Kline. The second best was Debra Monk.

The third best was Frank Langella.

I had a small part in a play with Kevin and Debra. The play was called “Some Americans Abroad.” After we’d rehearsed for two weeks, I asked the stage manager about our progress. He said: “It’s going well. These two,” (he pointed at Kevin and Debra) “are doing good work.”

I said: “What about me?”

He said: “You’re doing fine.”

“Fine? But is my work as good as theirs?”

“No,” he said. “But it’s better than most actors ever do.”

The theater is the only institution in the world which has been dying for four thousand years and has never succumbed.

Theater attracts people who are not well served by jobs. They want to make a living, of course, but they also want to perform. Even when actors have other jobs, they often think of their work in terms of performance. You can see this in the way people describe their jobs even when there is no audience. For example I once heard someone say of an investment banker, “Oh, he’s good. He’s like a Broadway actor.”

I am fascinated by the psychology of a Broadway actor. Imagine you’re an aspiring actor, and you’ve just gotten a part in a Broadway play. You are excited about it! This is your big chance!

But now something odd happens: the play is so successful that it runs for twenty years. Well, that’s great! Twenty years! And yet: somehow it doesn’t feel as good as you would have thought. The first few years were amazing; maybe even the first ten were exciting. But after that it became routine. You keep going to rehearsals and performing and collecting your paycheck, but it all seems kind of pointless after a while.

The same thing happens when you get a

Broadway actors think of acting in terms of a hierarchy: film acting, TV acting, stage acting. They think film and TV are easier than stage. But they’re wrong.

Stage acting is harder because you have to do it every night. Night after night, you have to pretend to discover America or kill the king or fall in love. The audience knows how it’s going to end, so the only way to keep their attention is to make them forget it’s a play, and that’s hard when there are no cameras or retakes — when you have to do it over and over till the run ends.

Film acting is different. In film you get many chances to get each scene right. You can spend all day on a single short piece of film; if something goes wrong, you can reshoot it twenty times till it’s perfect.

When Broadway actors look down on TV and film actors, they’re really just afraid that someone will make them do those jobs for real.

The most important difference between good and bad actors is their ability to focus and listen. If your mind is elsewhere, if you’re thinking about what you’re going to say next, you’re not listening, and you’re not communicating. Even if the audience doesn’t notice you’re distracted, they’ll feel that something is lacking.

Good actors are good at listening because they can focus. And they can focus because they care about what they’re doing.

It’s hard to care about anything enough to do it well when you know that it’s only temporary. But it’s not just that a Broadway show is permanent in a way a movie isn’t: it’s also the difference between doing something for a few months and knowing that’s the best you’ll ever do it, and doing something for a few months with the expectation that there will be another chance in the future. (The only thing more demoralizing than having to leave a job you love is having to quit a job because you don’t love it.)

Actors can deliberately learn to focus better by making themselves more emotionally involved with the material they work with. They might start by trying to reach out past the text of the play, and imagine what’s going on in the characters’ minds, beyond what’s

People often ask me whether I think theatre will survive as a form of entertainment. My answer is that it’s not up to me. As an actor, all I can do is offer the best that I can and hope that others will respond to my work.

I don’t believe in asking for permission. For me, acting has been a calling since I was a very small child, and the only way to pursue it has been to do so with everything I’ve had in me.

When the critics come knocking at your door, you want them to go away and leave you alone. But if they give you a good review? You invite them in for tea.

One of the things that bothers me about people who have a lot of experience with bad situations, like a lot of actors, is that they use it as an excuse for why they don’t do meaningful things.

“I’m just not ready,” you’ll hear them say, or “I’m not equipped to handle this,” or “I want to be sure I know what I’m doing first.”

Or: “I’m working on myself right now,” they say, or maybe “I am developing my craft.”

These are all euphemisms for fear.

The thing is: everybody’s got some fear. Everybody’s got something they’re afraid of. And that’s what all this talk about being afraid is really about: people talking about their fears.

When you act, you have to acknowledge that there are risks involved. But when you acknowledge the risk, you can’t forget the reward – and the reward is worth the risk. When it comes to acting, the reward is personal growth and an increased capacity for empathy and understanding. The risks? Well… sometimes you bomb, but even then you learn something from it and you still get to go home at night with a clear conscience because you did your best.

The great actors do not need to be told what to do; they are so skilled at their professions that they can see at once what needs to be done. And the great directors do not need to tell them what to do; they know how to guide them, sometimes by sug-gestion or explanation, but often merely by example or even silence.

I make my living as a writer. I am a professional, and I know exactly how much of what I write is original and how much of it is mere hackwork. But the amount of originality that the world demands from artists is a thousand times greater than from bus drivers or ordinary hack writers.

All you need for success in this business is talent, hard work, and passion for your craft. Of course, if you possess these virtues, you will be successful in any field of endeavor you choose to pursue: medicine, law, politics, tech. But the best way to waste your life would be by taking vows of poverty and chastity and giving up all personal ambition in order to devote your life to some vague idea called “God’s cause.”