«This is why you hire professionals to do this,»

«For me the challenge is to make sure the shows are good this year and to not burn out,»

«after I complete my first season.»

«Obviously at first, there were a lot of people who were worried about, 'Am I gonna have a job?'»

«We have to be careful of how we interact, and she gets blamed for all kinds of decisions I make, ... I think it's easier to blame her than me.»

«[Weighing the idea, Thompson remembered his mother's response when his father asked what she thought of his sermons after church.] She didn't know the wisdom of opening night, ... It's the most vulnerable time for an actor. It's not the time to give notes. She was very blunt and more critical than positive. And my father would become beside himself for the rest of the afternoon.»

«part vision, part coaching, part recruitment and fundraising and part conversation and collaboration. My job is to articulate the vision of the theater and to make it happen, and I know the only way I can do that is to have a lot of people joining into that vision. I view it as a serve-and-lead kind of job. The hard part is figuring out when you need to do which.»

«The characters make fools of themselves repeatedly, and show how crazy we all act when we try to pursue eternal youth.»

«By the second act, you realize this young man is not going to live, ... Something visceral happens. I remember you could hear people start crying, and they would cry at different places. There's something about that that's what theater is all about. The audience has bought into the story, into the person, to the degree that it matters what happens next on the stage. It's at the heart of why live theater works in a way that the movies and television can rarely hope to. There's some kind of primal human connection to that kind of storytelling.»

«The only downside I can see is that we can't prepay until 2014, rather than 2010.»