Quotes About Theater

Theater is a local art. You perform for the people in the theater that day.

I keep coming back to it, over and over - adultery and cheating. It's the most interesting problem in the theater. How else do you get Oedipus? That's the first cheating in the theater.

Because I was a dancer, I started going to auditions for musical theater, which forced me to sing.

People don't really want reality. They want theater, and that's different.

Security theater is the idea of putting on a big show of security in order to make people feel safe. That's why the TSA screens everything and takes your stuff away.

I hate it when theater people go on about professionalism - aren't they boring? I try to be as unprofessional as possible. And I'm a little bit politically incorrect.

I come from the theater, where the response to your work is immediate, and I suppose there's a part of me that still craves that.

Since I was from the theater, that's how I learned how to go through the process of being a character. That's how I learned, and that's what I was comfortable doing. And then, the first feature films, I'm sure I was no fun because I did not want to be spontaneous in that filmic way that really can work for you.

At some point, when I was 14 or 15, the idea crossed my mind to become an actor... I hadn't been to the theater much... When I grew up, we had one TV channel, which was sufficient.

The language of film is further and further away from the language of theater and is closer to music. It's abstract but still narrative.

I think I'll always prefer theater to working in front of the camera. It seems a more distilled form of the craft.

The chief characteristic of 'The Tribune' under Greeley was an aggressive and even ostentatious purity. 'Immoral and degrading police reports,' and any notices of the existence of the theater, whether in news or advertising, were at first scrupulously excluded.

I don't believe there is something called 'film' and something called 'theater,' and that words belong in the theater. Some rather bad films have few words in them; some good films have a lot of words in them.

I grew up in the theater and danced ballet atrociously.

After 'Dexter' and 'La Lupe', I would love to return to theater. I'm just ready for more.

My generation of director has no illusions that we are going to be fed and cared for by subsidized theater in America.

I can't stand interpretation. I think it's one of the great scourges of the theater. I just think, 'Don't get in the way of the play.'

I realized that after years of studying Shakespeare and Chekhov and regional repertory theater, what I really wanted to do was bust in and rob a bank and jump in the screaming getaway car and tear through the city and get in a shootout.

Theater audiences don't pull punches. They'll let you know when they're feeling ripped off.

I started off at the Second City in Chicago... It's an improvisational theater that ostensibly does social and political satire, but when I was there, we generally didn't. We did character work, and we did just the silliest things we could think of. We weren't all that concerned with, you know, changing the world through mime.

The whole film genre is one of deceit. It is the suspension of disbelief. That's what all theater and all film is based on.

Leisure time is when I'm not at the Booth Theater.

It's like being a gym rat, but you're a theater rat, and then that becomes your fraternity house. That becomes your extended family.

The beauty of theater is that you get to live the character from beginning to end without stopping. The natural momentum of the story propels you through in such a way that feels organic.