Success Quote by Judd Hirsch

The brutal honesty here is that Hirsch isn’t talking about reviews, craft, or even audience approval. He’s talking about a private benchmark: if the actor isn’t emotionally taken hostage by the ending, the whole enterprise is suspect. For a performer with Hirsch’s long résumé, that’s a quietly radical standard. It rejects professionalism-as-distance - the idea that you can hit your marks, land your lines, and call it success. He’s insisting the work has to pierce the person doing it.

The phrasing stacks failures like dominos: “I’ve completely failed, and so has the play, and so has our production.” It’s a chain of accountability that collapses the usual hierarchy. No hiding behind “the writing” or “the direction.” If the ending doesn’t move him, it’s not just that he didn’t access something; it’s that everyone, collectively, didn’t build the conditions for feeling to happen. That’s the subtext: theater is an ecosystem. Emotion isn’t an accidental byproduct, it’s the product.

Context matters: Hirsch comes out of a tradition where live performance is an act of communion, not content delivery. Night after night, the ending becomes a stress test. If it stops hurting - or stops surprising - the production has calcified into routine, and routine is theater’s slow death. His closing line, “there really isn’t any reason to want to do it,” isn’t melodrama. It’s a work ethic. The reason to do the play is the risk of being moved, publicly, in real time.