Quotes About Theater

Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.

The avant-garde theater is fun; it is free-wheeling, bold, iconoclastic, and often wildly, wildly funny. If you will approach it with childlike innocence -- putting your standard responses aside, for they do not apply -- if you will approach it on its own terms, I think you will be in for a liberating surprise. I think you may no longer be content with plays that you can't remember halfway down the block.

Anything you put in a play -- any speech -- has got to do one of two things: either define character or push the action of the play along.

The condition of the theater is always an accurate measure of the cultural health of a nation. A play always exists in the present tense (if it is a valuable one), and its music -- its special noise -- is always contemporary. The most valuable function of the theater as an art form is to tell us who we are, and the health of the theater is determined by how much of that we want to know.

It is a lazy public which promotes a slothful and irresponsible theater.

A play is fiction -- and fiction is fact distilled into truth.

I am not interested in living in a city where there isn't a production by Samuel Beckett running.

If you can't face Hiroshima in the theatre, you'll eventually end up in Hiroshima itself

All programmers are playwrights and all computers are lousy actors.

You're through in pictures, and plays, and vaudeville, and radio, and everything! You're a corpse, and you don't know it. Go get yourself buried.

Acta est fabula [The play is over].

In my mind ran the immortal line of James Thurber, that phrase at once so intensely comic and so pregnant with suggestions of unnameable terror: "Now we go up to the garrick and become warbs." We were going up to the garrick all right, and warbs suddenly seemed the least terrifying of the things we might become.

Still, I think Hardy's the most likely person in this theater to be snapped up by the studios." "But he can't act!" Norman protested. "Sure he can't act. Neither can Nelson Eddy, and he makes a living." "But Eddy can sing." "All right. So Hardy can't sing either. That makes him twice as attractive.

she'd left, feeling the emptiness of the big theater

fresco of an actor's mask from a room in Augustus' house on the Palatine Hill, which may have been his bedroom. The princeps enjoyed theater and, to judge by his last words, saw himself as a performer. He asked the people around his bedside: "Have I played my part in the farce of life well enough?

I have no interest in Shakespeare and all that British nonsense... I just wanted to get famous and all the rest is hogwash.

He was like an actor in one of those plays from between the wars where everyone talks for a long time but very little happens.

This wasn't a house. It was a movie set. The art, the hardwood floors, the rugs, the grand piano, the Italian lighting and furniture

I don't mind playing even a grandfather provided the role is good.

April was my first major role and provided me with my Equity card.

In Providence, we didn't have a first-run movie theater. But we did have an indie movie theatre on the Brown campus. That was the theater we'd go to. I think, as highbrow as it sounds, that I grew up on the films.

In New York, the theater is a destination point. In Los Angeles, no matter how provocative, how successful, how star-studded the theater event may be, it is, at best, a second-class citizen.

My first job when I got my equity card was acting in 14 plays back-to-back. Playing that many roles, you look for ways of differentiating the characters physically, which goes hand in hand with understanding them psychologically.

To be in theater you have to be a kind of psychologist, for you're always trying to understand character and motives.