at Stratford, Connecticut and successfully auditioned for the title role. The play was performed for student groups in the spring season that year and Noth felt the enthusiastic response of students from the inner cities to Hamlet's soliloquies made it one of his greatest experiences. In the 1988/89 season of Milwaukee Repertory Theater, he played a murderous bandit in the experimental Chilean play The Torch. In April 1989, Noth played "bohemian--out of place, angry with the world" Frank Shabata in Darrah Cloud's adaption of the Willa Cather novel O Pioneers! in the Other Season at Seattle Repertory Theatre, co-produced by Women's Project. He also appeared in George Bernard Shaw play Arms and the Man at the Roundabout Theatre in 1989 as Sergius Saranoff. The New York Times wrote that Noth's acting "captures the strutting buffoon in the character" but lost "the more pitiable side", while The Christian Science Monitor wrote if "Noth's swaggering Sergius were any more Sergius-like, he would burst out of his uniform". Noth acted in plays for La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club and L.A.'s Mark Taper Forum. In 1997, Noth played an opera composer in the Romulus Linney play Patronage at Ensemble Studio Theatre's 20th Annual Festival of New One-Act Plays. The New York Times wrote "the actors are so good that they may have put more flesh on the characters than even Mr. Linney intended" and that Noth and co-star Dana Reeve were "amusingly synchronized as they purred in unison...to the strains of Schubert". Linney became friends with Noth when they worked together on Patronage and Noth encouraged him to write a play about Delmore Schwartz as Noth "is a poet himself and loves the poetry of Delmore Schwartz", according to Linney. Noth performed in the 2002 staged reading of Linney's play Klonsky and Schwartz at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's annual Playwrights Conference and helped workshop the play at the 2003 Last Frontier Theatre Conference. In 1998, while working on Sex and the City before its TV debut, Noth did his first radio play as fortune-hunter Morris Townsend in the Voice of America production of The Heiress, an adaptation of the Henry James novel Washington Square, opposite Amy Irving in the title role. In 2000, Noth made his Broadway debut in a revival of Gore Vidal's 1960 play The Best Man at Virginia Theatre as the conniving Senator Joseph Cantwell. Variety wrote that Noth "plays