Quotes About Theater

To be working in the theater steadily and to be recognized and appreciated by the community means the world.

I want to be a playwright the way people are bank tellers. I want to keep doing it and have it go steadily and smoothly.

A lot of people like to run in plays because it's a nice, steady job.

You're stealing people's secrets. You convince them to give up their life and imagine the life you've created is real or more interesting. If it's a good play, they'll cry or think private thoughts about their lives or laugh.

When you're onstage in theater, if you mess up a line, there's no 'Cut! We'll get it again.' It's full steam ahead.

Actors, when they're older, still get a chance to let off steam or something and work things off on stage.

My parents brought us up in a very clever way, which was that they saw what we were interested in naturally, and then they encouraged whatever that may be. When I started sharing a keen interest in drama and the theater, instead of steering me away from it, they encouraged me to see plays and think about drama school.

You can't just keep recycling revivals. And you can't keep betting on the efforts of guys like me who've been around. You have to take the next step and bet on the next generation.

Watching my stepfather and mother working in the industry - acting and composing - and seeing firsthand how difficult it is to achieve a successful career in the theater, I thought it might be safer to go to art school with the aim of becoming a painter.

My stepmother wanted to be an actress.

I'll never forget the first moment I stepped on a Broadway stage. It was in Grease, and I knew it was momentous. My parents were there, and I got into a cab with them afterward and started crying.

I stepped in for Nicole Kidman in 'Dogville' when she left that film.

From almost the first time I stepped on a stage, I knew that was what I wanted to do.

The only reason I signed on for a speech and drama course was because I thought it would be easy, but as soon as I stepped on the stage, I thought, 'This is exactly where I belong.'

The excitement of stepping onto a stage - there's nothing quite like it.

It's more enjoyable when I'm disguised in some way; stepping into someone else's shoes is part of the reason why I became an actor.

Aside from being the funniest play in N.Y.C., '39 Steps' is also the only show crazy enough to ask me to be a part of it.

What was that all about!' (In this sense the world of the company mirrored the world itself, which sometimes managed to stage a rousing first act, and perhaps even provide a few engaging scenes of a second before devolving into a playwright's nightmare, wherein the actors either butchered their lines or entirely forgot them, scenery collapsed, props misfired, and most of the audience left the theater during intermission.)

On the stage it is always now.

A play visibly represents pure existing.

A dramatist is one who believes that the pure event, an action involving human beings, is more arresting than any comment that can be made upon it.

I regard the theater as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being. This supremacy of the theater derives from the fact that it is always "now" on the stage.

perfectly awful things. Farces,—that's what they are!

would always advise any young writer for the theater to do everything—to adapt plays, to translate plays, to hang around theaters, to paint scenery, to become an actor. . . . There's a bottomless pit in the acquisition of how to tell an imagined story to listeners and viewers.