Quotes About Theater

In fact, my uncle did his first full play at the Westin Playhouse because my dad put in a good word for him to the producer.

My uncle Les Dolliver was a partner with the Nasser brothers, who owned a string of theaters in San Francisco, and also supplied motion picture projectors and seats for theaters. So I was always around theater people.

Acting... honestly, I'm so uncomfortable and so awkward that I could never think about setting foot in a theater room or acting class.

My parents felt so uncomfortable coming to the kind of theater I was in; they had nothing to say about it.

In some European theaters, it's still not uncommon to have a late start and three LONG intermissions, because people actually eat and drink and converse during the intermissions.

I had kind of an attitude, which was not uncommon in New York. Theater people who went to Hollywood to do sitcoms were selling out. That was the attitude. And I didn't really relish the idea of being cast in a sitcom, because I shared that attitude.

I believe that my art gets across the point that I'm in this morality theater trying to help the underdog, and I'm speaking socially here, showing concern and making psychological and philosophical statements for the underdog.

You cannot underestimate the influence of Shakespeare.

It's too easy to underestimate your audience. But it's not rocket science: bad plays don't get people on seats; good plays do.

After my father passed away in 1989, I fell pretty hard for theater as an undergraduate at the University of Oregon. Before he died, he planted the seed that maybe I should look into performing.

I think the best dramas are as funny as possible and the best comedies have, underneath them, real substance.

The divinely talented Adam Arkin. So underrated. Every time I do a piece and they go, 'You know, you need a husband in this,' I ask, 'Can Adam Arkin do it?'

'Man and Superman,' first performed in 1905, is by common consent one of George Bernard Shaw's greatest and most significant plays, yet hardly anybody performs it today, for the understandable reason that an uncut performance runs for about five hours.

Kabuki is the way that I so often write; Noh is how I would write if I were more 'spiritual,' more understated, or perhaps just older.

I understood that I was not the best director in the world nor the worst director in the world. I realized that there is a very mysterious element to what works and what doesn't work in the theater. And it's good to know that from the beginning.

I understood very little about the significance of the Tony before, but I've learned that it makes a huge significance to whether or not your show is going to run.

All I wanted was to be a regional-theater actor, to be in a company. I thought it would be a great life. I don't think I understood how difficult it would be.

I think of my father and how confused he was by me. He understood my love for theater, and he understood that New York City was the only place that it was happening in America, really, in any live way.

I am from a really small town where theater wasn't super-cool, I would say. Maybe undervalued? So, I would drive into St. Louis, where it was cool. I would go to these all-boy schools where they needed girls in their shows, and I would do my shows there.

Western classical music had long known syncopation. But no one had felt compelled to snap his fingers to music before American jazz and musical theater, which sent a previously undiscovered current coursing through the body, demanding outlet.

Shakespeare is undoubtedly the greatest dramatist the world has known, and 95 countries translate his work into their languages.

I was always about working. I like working. I don't like being unemployed. I love acting.

Pretty much from 1979 through 1988, the backbone of my career was the theater. Working on Broadway a couple of times, working off-Broadway, and also doing a lot of regional theater. Make no mistake, I lived very frugally. I had an apartment that was real cheap. I would get two or three jobs per season, and in between I'd be on unemployment.

I think the unemployment rate for actors is pretty much the same in Sydney, London and New York. In all three cities, there are more actors than there are jobs. But I do think that there are far more acting opportunities in London and New York than in Sydney, where there are approximately seven actors that you see over and over again in every play.