Quotes About Theater

Quentin's conversations with his parents were so circular and self-defeating, they sounded like experimental theater.

I understand the fear that by losing contact with books on the printed page, we're somehow surrendering some aspect of our humanity, but that's just not the case…Stories were alive long before pages. Stories were theater. Stories were hieroglyphics…The medium is not the message. The medium is the delivery system. The story is the message.

I never did theater. I was a theater major at USC my first year because I didn't get into the film school. I was biding my time, hoping to be accepted to film school, and I ended up transferring to UCLA my sophomore year.

To create characters, one must build background. And one of the tools we use is improvisation.

When I started studying acting, I was enamoured of actors who used movement to enhance the language.

There is a drama queen in me, as I love acting, and I used to stand in front of the mirror and act since my childhood.

I used to do school plays. I never really took any acting classes. I'm just a natural ham, I guess.

Before I ever acted as an amateur - which I did a great deal at school and at university - I used to go to the theater with my parents in the north of England, where I was born and brought up... Theater of all sorts.

Sometimes you can fall into bad habits on film or rest on your laurels, and you can't do that in theater. I think it's such a useful tool as a person and as an actor to go back and forth between those two mediums.

Acting has been very useful to me.

I'm studying theater and media. I don't really know why I took media, because I'm so useless with technology, though it's fun. But, I do love theater and am having a great time learning about all the practitioners and getting to perform with my friends.

I see myself as not a typical theater person, but a person who uses the theater as a place to meet people and explore ideas.

There's been lots of theater that uses hip-hop in it, but more often than not, it's used as a joke - isn't it hilarious that these characters are rapping. I treat it as a musical form, and a musical form that allows you to pack in a ton of lyric.

I'm not really a 'puppet' person in particular; I think they are very theatrical, and I've found different uses for them in shows, but my true interest is in writing Broadway musicals.

'Porgy and Bess' has never been thought of as a dance show, and yet it's filled with dance. It uses dance to punctuate the action, or as background, or as atmosphere; even when it's front and center, it isn't crucial.

With my good friend Rob Penny, I founded the Black Horizons Theater in Pittsburgh with the idea of using the theater to politicize the community or, as we said in those days, to raise the consciousness of the people.

My usual route is, I do a play at South Coast Rep, then there's time between and I revise it, and then I take it to New York.

When I got out of the Army, I started writing the usual 'Catcher in the Rye' imitations, and then I wrote something that was done Off-Off Broadway in a theater. It was called 'What Else Is There?' and it was four or five people playing missiles in a silo waiting to take off.

One of the things I love about stage makeup is I get to play up my eyes even more than usual.

I think with Shakespeare you can be required to do absolutely anything at the turn of a sixpence - suddenly you go into a battle, suddenly you utter something passionate.

The device of speaking directly to the listener is as old as Shakespeare's asides and probably much older than that. Still, we try to balance those moments with many more moments of utter sincerity and I believe the same is true in 'Annette.'

I remember thinking, when I was playing Hedda Gabler, that several sequences of the play were utterly absurd.

As much as I can act, I don't have anything in me that yearns to be an actor - that sense of needing to be onstage, in costume, in character; that is utterly not interesting to me.

I believe that theater has to be utterly life-changing for the people watching it.