Quotes About Theater

Before shooting, I prepare with the actors much more like it's a theater play than a movie. Apparently, that way of working is very unusual.

I still get called 'a stick of dynamite' or 'pint-sized dynamo,' stuff like that. Actually, I was too busy to notice there was anything unusual about being a woman director until the early 1980s, when I looked around the professional theater and realized there weren't many of us. You have to make more of a case for yourself than any man.

I had unusual parents. We'd been to Europe. We'd been in the theater. We were sort of like the Addams Family.

My greatest trouble is getting the curtain up and down.

In an amusement park, you can go on a roller coaster that carries you up and down, or you can go on another kind of ride that whirls you around in a circle. Similarly, there are different sorts of entertaining experiences in the theater.

Although I'm perceived as very optimistic and upbeat, it comes out of being the opposite of that - feeling isolated or lonely, looking for meaning and the kinds of things that ease that suffering in life, and finding them in large-scale social interaction, like theater and games.

I had a sort of rocky upbringing, and I think the theater was a safe place for me.

Theater actually took time to pique my interest. It just wasn't a part of my upbringing. I don't have anyone in the arts in my family. I wasn't brought up particularly cultured. It was always TV and film for me.

One reason why Shakespeare's plays remain so popular is that they're now regularly presented in updated stagings with a contemporary flavor.

Doing theater anywhere, especially in L.A., is a constant uphill battle, and there's also the unsexy parts of the business that you're faced with, like getting money. It's a really great thing to do. You feel like you're really an artist when you're doing that and you're in a company of artists.

The biggest audience for Off Broadway is mostly coming in on a train - either Upper East Siders or Metro-North. I go to the theater, and everyone around me is over 50. How interested will they be in my kind of work?

When I was young and growing up in New York, my parents took me to children's theater quite often - elaborate presentations of 'Goldilocks' and 'Rapunzel' for Upper East Side kids. As I grew older, they took me to adult theater, mostly musicals.

If you've been in a film that's seen by millions and millions and millions of people, you're more likely to be recognized for that than for your theater performances, which were seen by considerably less people. Why would I get upset by that?

I was terribly upset not to be in 'Dickensian,' so I pretend to look down on it. The part I should have played, Mrs. Gamp, is done brilliantly by Pauline Collins, but I entered this world for no other reason than to play that part.

On stage, it is a tremendous thing to be able to make people laugh. But one of the things that I have always loved is when I am in shows where you can turn the audience upside down and make them cry or move them. That is when things are the most rewarding.

The tradition of the South is not urban... I think we are a region of storytellers, naturally, just from our tribal instincts. We did not have the pleasures of the theater or the dance, motion pictures when they came along. We simply entertain each other by talking.

I used to do a lot of plays in English, Hindi, and Urdu. I wanted to be an actor since I was three and a half.

I was 17 when I first acted on stage. I was a part of an Urdu adaptation of 'Spartacus' in the titular role.

In the commercial theater, I've been pretty fortunate. The producers that I've worked with have allowed me to define the artistic integrity, the artistic limits of the work.

I had an older brother who was very interested in literature, so I had an early exposure to literature, and and theater. My father sometimes would work in musical comedies.

Do some work in the theater if you can. It is the best training you can get.

Film actors reach a certain level, but they don't get beyond it unless they work in the theater.

I work constantly but I work at a lot of different things. You know, I run a theater company in New York, I direct plays, act in plays, in movies, so I try to keep it eclectic.

I am a real ham. I love an audience. I work better with an audience. I am dead, in fact, without one.