Quotes About Theater

Free speech is the right to shout 'theater' in a crowded fire.

A group of stage mothers from the Children's Palace Theater was enlisted to make the gift baskets. While calfskin could not be found for the making of gloves, the most supple replacement—puppy—was chosen.

With playwriting, there's a lot of false starts. Ill-fated first acts, etcetera. I blame it all on Shakespeare. He stole all my ideas like three hundred years before I was even born. He futuristically ruined my career.

My parents came to see me in a play at Eton when I was 16. And then, when I said I wanted to try for drama school, they knew there was enough passion there for them to be brave and back me.

After you do a play like 'The Normal Heart,' it's hard to find something you feel so passionate about.

Acting is something I'm extremely passionate about.

I've always been very passionate about acting. I appeared in panto in the Everyman from the age of five.

Musical theater is one of my passions.

My grandparents, Jim and Pat Moore, were an incredible couple. They drove me to the community theater, where I did plays as a kid.

I would say I've actually done a lot more comedy than I've done drama. It's weird the way that worked out, because when I came out of theater school I took myself way too seriously, so it's kind of ironic that I ended up sort of going down the comedy path.

When I was a 25-year-old kid, I raised $260,000 for my first show, 'The Pajama Game,' in such a homemade, pathetic, endearing way - a buck here, a buck there.

Paul Schofield said something like, 'If I'm not acting in a play, I don't really exist.' Those weren't the exact words, but he meant it's only when I'm acting in a play that I've got something to say about the world. And then why should I talk, when people can come to see it?

Pay in the acting world hasn't kept up with inflation.

Basically, the actor's job is to pay attention to the script.

On stage, you've got dialogue you've learned. You've got a paying audience. It couldn't be better, you know?

I'm not doubtful that I am doing what I should be doing - writing for theater - and that I'm doing it in a way no one else does it. Whether anyone else is paying attention or anyone else cares, I'm still ambivalent about that. It's still an open question.

It sounds so incredibly selfish, but you just can't earn the same money doing theater as you can doing television and film. I know that's awful, but you get a mortgage and a family, and suddenly, paying that seems quite important.

Everyone pays lip service to this whole idea of doing more new plays, and nobody ever does it.

In my whole career, in fact, I can remember only two first nights when a show was at its peak on the first night. And I just wish we could devise a system where critics came not on a single evening but were given a choice of performances to attend.

In the theater, you have to speak so people in the last row of the peanut gallery can hear you. With television, the camera does that work for you.

You could say I'm a character actress. Or maybe a character actress who does peculiar, interesting lead roles. Does that make sense?

You could say I'm a character actress. Or maybe a character actress who does peculiar, interesting lead roles.

When I was growing up in Pennsylvania, auditioning for Broadway was my dream.

People say, 'How can you stay in a play for a long time?' I say, 'The audience is never the same.'