What are you reading?

"Lies My Teacher Told Me," by James Loewen. He goes through 20 high school and pre-college history books and then says everything they got wrong, according to the latest data and evidence. And I started reading "Mrs. Dalloway," by Virginia Woolf, because I was reading this book of essays called "The Things That Matter," by Edward Mendelson, and that's basically this guy who goes through and reinterprets interpreting books, and how if you think about books that move you emotionally and not just purely intellectually, then Woolf becomes the center of the canon.

What do you like about it?

When you do theater, you're always looking for the characters' motivation or action they're trying to pursue — what is their inner life that's pushing them through their outer life. "Mrs. Dalloway" brings that out — the inner motivation and hidden history and secrets that motivate what these people do. It's interesting to me, as a director of theater, to see the richness of a character and then see if I can bring that to a character on stage.

Does reading help you discover any of your hidden parts and help you direct?

Reading was always like a mystery to me, all the way through high school, before I went to college. Not being able to do it really put a desire in there for me to do it. ... You cannot really work as a director in the theater of arts if you can't be moved by one of the forms of art. ... Finding those moments in literature where you can't put down the book is what I'm trying to do in theater.