AVC: How does that compare to the process of being in a film?
LS: I don't really get that much from film, because most of that is organizational stuff, which I've never been good at. I feel more comfortable when I don't have to cross all the Ts and dot all the Is. I like the intuitive process, and that happens when the actors arrive.
AVC: Does your emphasis on theatre have anything to do with you growing up in New York?
LS: Probably. I certainly saw theatre at a fairly young age and was intrigued by it early on. But I've always been more interested in the audience than I have in the plays. I like that idea of all those people sitting in the dark together. It's kind of fun. It was fun when I was little. I remember sitting in a big crowd, and the lights go down, and you're like, "Oooh. That's cool."
AVC: You've mentioned the threat of being typecast and stuck in a role for life. While your roles have varied, they often have similar qualities—they're often very internal, emphatic, deep-burning people. Do you see a similarity there?
LS: Sure. I think there are similarities in the kinds of things I'm attracted to as an actor. I don't know if it's the similarities between the parts, or it's the similarities between my approach to the parts, but I've always been interested in flaws. Flaws reveal a lot about a character and who people are. The flawed elements of a character are where I find their humanity. Those are the things I tend to identify with—the weaknesses. I don't know why, but I identify with struggle more than with success.
AVC: Is that related to your background?
LS: Possibly, but I think it's something that's built into us to help us achieve success. It's part of human nature that we are intuitively aware of conflict in order to overcome it.
AVC: Are there more of those flawed characters on film, or in theatre?
LS: They're more articulated in plays, especially if you pick the right plays. Shakespeare's full of them; duality is the core of his writing for me. Every one of his heroes carries that kind of acute sense of their mortality and flaws, and I love that about his writing.
AVC: Biographies on you emphasize your working-class childhood and your upper-class education. What happened in between?
LS: Well, in all fairness, my mother—we weren't wealthy, but she was a cultured woman. She's been trying to get me to play classical violin and piano since I was five, she taught me to read long before I was in public school. So I had a range of education and culture that wasn't necessarily in sync with my peers, because it was my mom's education and culture. I knew a little bit about Tolstoy and Bach, and not nearly enough about Motown and the Knicks. So I had a rebellion, I think I gravitated toward hip-hop and the Knicks and street culture because it was further away from what I was experiencing in my house.
Then my father came back on the scene and said, "You should go to private school." It wasn't as unfamiliar as people imagined it was, because I had that background with my mother. Art and literature were at the core of who she was as a person. I don't know if I related that much to public-school kids, or kids with a lot of money—I felt uncomfortable in that situation, embarrassed by where we lived, things like that. But art and literature were present there, where it wasn't as present in the public-school programs. I think that's a really big problem. Call me communist, but I think that's something that everyone, regardless of their family's income, has a right to, and I was fortunate enough to have a mother who felt that way as well. So when I finally ended up in private school, I had a background from her that I could connect to the program with, like, "Hey, I'm familiar with art and literature, let me hang out over here."
AVC: How has that education helped you as an actor?
LS: I wouldn't have known about Shakespeare. I wouldn't have known about Pinter. Actors are as good as they allow themselves to be, and to portray life, you have to have as broad an experience of it as you possibly can, so everything's worth it. Someone who spent six years in public school and never went back is just as interesting an actor, but they don't have the range. And that's going to be difficult when they come up against a Shakespeare play, because that takes a certain level of reading and knowledge of history and art and culture to adapt to that kind of material. And I think that exists even in contemporary theatre. You are what you know, as an actor, so you gotta try to know as much as you possibly can.
AVC: But your approach to Shakespeare is based in the humanity of the character rather than the more educated aspects. You don't seem to approach the plays from a classical perspective.
LS: I think education gets a bad rap. I think when you're looking at the educated aspects of Shakespeare, you'd be surprised how much goes into understanding and analyzing those plays. You have to know what you're saying, and to know what you're saying, you have to have a foundation in an arcane language, and that takes reading. And familiarizing yourself with other poetry of that period, and iambic pentameter, and verse structure. It's about music too, someone who studied music has an inlet into those plays. Plus knowing little bits of history. I mean, even understanding that people were smaller back then, and their lives were shorter, and how that affected the way they behave—their attitudes and emotions were in many ways profoundly affected by the way in which they were forced to live their lives. To understand the range of emotional behavior, you have to understand the society and the culture at least a little bit before you can present it to a contemporary audience in a clear way. Even if you're not doing a period production, you have to understand what was intended when it was written, and you have to find a way to translate that so it's conveyed when it's performed now.
AVC: Doesn't that risk tying Shakespeare to a time? Isn't the beauty of it that it's still relevant and comprehensible today?
LS: Well, absolutely, but I think that first you have to be able to understand it. I think you have to understand how it was intended, to then be able to change it into something else. You have to understand first the premise it was based on. It's awfully hard to perform Shakespeare in Swahili if you don't speak English. First you have to learn English, then you have to translate it into Swahili. Do you know what I mean?
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