Is the safe choice the wrong choice?

Last night I put up some work from a play titled "Guilty Conscience." I feel my work was pretty good, considering I have no director, and I had to edit some of the script to make it a workable one man scene. When I was asked how I felt about my performance, I said I thought it was pretty good - I wanted to work on showing the choices I had made for this character - detail oriented, obsessive -compulsive, analytical, and competent almost to the point of being arrogant, and I wanted to see if I could portray the character, his alter ego, and characters that the alter ego references all onstage. (It would be much easier to do on film with camera angles, wardrobe, etc.)

All of my objectives I accomplished with great success, he indicated.

Then he made an interesting observation.

The work that I've done so far (granted, only two pieces, but that is what he's seen) has been very clinically precise. My choices are clear and well presented, but they are, to use his term, "safe choices." There isn't any "thinking outside the box" for lack of a better term.

Now, in all honesty, I probably do tend to take the safer choice. Is that the wrong choice? I debated some on the way home last night--does thinking "outside the box" allow you to disregard the intention of the writer? And how far does that translate in casting?

For example:

Let's say the role calls for the following:
A tall, elegant man in his late 40s, dressed immaculately in a three piece suit. His attitude is one of absolute self confidence - his enemies would call it arrogance - that is tempered by a wry and amused self confidence.

It seems to me that playing this guy like a young Robin Williams on crack cocaine would be an prime example of thinking outside the box, but totally wrong in regards to the intention of the writer. So how does one resolve this conflict?

Wimping out and letting the director have the final say is one easy route to follow, although I seem to think that generally the writer and director are somewhere near the same page in regards to the vision of the project. This is one time where I think my intellect is getting in the way of my creativity.

I'll have to stew on this for a while, no doubt....