Quotes About Theater

I began acting on stage when I was 7 years old. My first role was as Dorothy in 'The Wizard of Oz' at Chicago's Center on Deafness in Northbrook, Illinois.

I played Dorothy in 'The Wizard of Oz.' That was my first role on stage.

I did the 'Wizard of Oz' in third grade, and I was a witch.

I did my first show in second grade. I was a munchkin in 'The Wizard of Oz.'

If you want to see what stage comedians did to get laffs a century ago, watch the 1910 'Wizard of Oz.' I hope you have a high tolerance for pratfalls.

I was Mary Poppins for Halloween when I was 3, with lipstick and a carpetbag. And I was Dorothy in 'The Wizard of Oz' in a production in my dad's barn.

I've wanted to act since I was seven. The year before, I'd been a munchkin in 'The Wizard of Oz' and was overcome with terror. The next year I just watched. My sister was in 'The Little Mermaid' and I had this deep knowing that I needed to be there on stage, not in the audience.

My taste comes from when I was 12 years old and saw Genesis or Laurie Anderson or some performance artist who had put paint on himself. I've seen a lot of theater, but that's not what woke up my taste to become a director; nontheatrical things were much more theatrical than the theater I was seeing.

I got a part in a play in 10th grade, and that changed everything, woke up my love of theater.

Strangely, when I was a kid, my first acting job, at 5 years old, was a performance of 'The Three Little Pigs.' They cast me as the Big Bad Wolf.

As far as theater goes, Sarah DeLappe's 'The Wolves' is one of my favorite things I've ever seen.

I regard the theater as a woman I loved dearly who treated me like dirt.

Well, I've been acting for 50 years now, professionally. I've been acting a lot longer. My mother reckons I was acting when I got out of the womb. But because I've been working in the theater, I've probably only done about 25 movies but I've done more than 100 plays.

In the future, I would like to do more films with contemporary themes. Perhaps comedy, which is something I have done in theater but not in cinema.

You can make a film in a way that, when the audience leaves the theater, they leave with certain answers in their head. But when you leave them with answers, you interrupt the process of thinking. If, instead, you raise questions about the themes and the story, this means that the audience is on its way to start thinking.

Of course theater will always be associated intimately to literature, but the themes or whatever have to penetrate you by the senses. Theater is a sensuous experience, and that's its main difference from film or any other dramatic art.

And that's what people want to see when they go to the theater. I believe at the end of the day, they want to see themselves - parts of their lives they can recognize. And I feel if I can achieve that, it's pretty spectacular.

My theory is that everything an actor does, from the way he looks at his watch to the way he moves across the stage, is in the service of advancing a story, and in that sense, it's all writing. In that sense we, while acting, write.

I worked out a rather deep-dish theory defining the theater as a form of architecture rather than a form of literature.

When I was in theater school, we did these relationship exercises - you would play my sister, and I'd give you all this information about my sister, and then we'd get up and perform this scene, and you'd pretend to react as my sister. It was like therapy!

Our demands are simple, normal, and therefore they are difficult to satisfy. All we ask is that an actor on the stage live in accordance with natural laws.

I ended up doing four or five plays in college and being an English major with my thesis in language acquisition, which I was planning to study in graduate school.

They say that theater is the actor's medium, television is the writer's medium and film is the director's medium, and it's really true.

I was in the Pacific. The Pacific Theater, as they say.