THEIR FAVORITE THINGS: Outside Mullingar Star Peter Maloney Shares His Theatregoing Experiences

"I grew up in the theater, working with my father's amateur company in upstate New York. My father, David Keating Maloney, left the professional theater
at the end of the Great Depression in 1939, leaving New York City to settle in a small town near Rochester. The first (and still) memorable performances
that influenced me were those of my father in plays like Papa Is All, in which he played a black-suited, bull-whip wielding Mennonite tyrant, and Gore Vidal's  The Best Man, in which he played the dying President of the United States. His death onstage left me paralyzed, unable, for a time, to get up and leave my seat in the Rochester Community Playhouse."

"It's hard to believe that in the mid-sixties I could sit in the orchestra of a Broadway house for $8.50, but that's what I paid to see Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
The play was a stunning, shattering experience, each of its three acts building in tension and energy to what seemed like an impossible level. I had never seen
a performance like Uta Hagen's, and so I chose this great actress to be my acting teacher a few years later, studying with her for four years."