Theater is the art that gathers a community of strangers in a room and asks them to agree, for a few hours, to believe the same impossible thing — that these are not actors but people, that these events are not staged but felt. The discipline of acting is the discipline of genuine attention in artificial circumstances: to listen as if the words you have rehearsed a hundred times are being heard for the first time. Nothing in the arts demands more of the inner life than this sustained, collaborative act of sustained pretense-that-becomes-truth.
Each step builds on the last.