Times acting in a 1979 Manhattan Theatre Club play about an IRA bombing victim. He also studied script analysis with Stella Adler. Career Theatre Noth "did off-off Broadway and was a bad waiter in a dozen different restaurants for five years." He was fired from a number of restaurants, once for forgetting to return Governor Hugh Carey's credit card with the bill, and settled into cater-waitering bar mitzvahs and weddings. Noth got his Actors' Equity membership while at the Circle Rep Lab. In Circle Repertory Company's 1980 production of Innocent Thoughts, Harmless Intentions he played soldier James "Duke" Wade in an Alaskan army outpost in 1951–52, part of what the CS Monitor called a "convincing squad of Actors' Equity enlisted men" in a play that was "impressively acted". He auditioned for Juilliard and Yale University and was accepted by both. He chose the shorter three-year degree at Yale School of Drama, where he got a scholarship. Noth acted in 25 or more plays while studying at Yale School of Drama, attending classes during the day and acting in plays at night. Noth's first-year acting project at Yale was the Maxim Gorky play The Lower Depths in 1982–1983. In 1984, Frank Rich of The New York Times wrote that of the supporting cast, only Noth's and Ray Aranha's performances "leaves firm impressions" in the world premiere of the Wole Soyinka political satire A Play of Giants at Yale Repertory Theatre, where Noth played a sculptor creating a portrait of African dictators gathered at a U.N. Embassy. In 1985, Noth acted in Keith Reddin's Rum and Coke at Yale Repertory Theatre, a play about the orchestration of the Bay of Pigs Invasion. By Noth's third year, he signed with an agent who saw him in a YSD production of Brendan Behan's The Hostage. Noth was also in Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters and William Shakespeare's Pericles, Prince of Tyre at YSD. After graduating with an MFA in 1985, Noth told his agent he would not do television and went on the theater circuit. His preference to work in theater informed his decision to live in New York instead of Los Angeles. However, roles were slow to come and he decided he could do television to survive. In 1986, while working on the TV series Hill Street Blues in L.A., Noth heard that Zoe Caldwell would be directing Hamlet at the American Shakespeare Festival