Quotes About Theater

We're actors — we're the opposite of people!

We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.

It's cold out there, colder than a ticket taker's smile at the Ivar Theatre on a Saturday night.

I liked the choreography, but I didn't care for the costumes.

The weary guests are asked to leave the warmth of the all-night theater, having slept on pictures others only dream on.

I'm happy that I feel a little less out of place in filmmaking than I once was - but it's almost impossible for a playwright in the U.S. to make a living. You can have a play, like I did with 'Angels ' and it still generates income for me, but it's not enough for me to live on and have health insurance.

The kind of theater that I do is sort of 'narrative realism ' which I think in the broadest sense is legitimate to say is mainstream. I mean, in a certain sense, Suzan-Lori's plays have had mainstream levels of success. But Suzan-Lori is in some ways not a narrative realist.

Be splendid tonight, be focused, have fun, make theater: That's our way of repudiating the bullies, the killjoys, the busybodies and blowhards. We know the secret of making art, while they only know the minor secret of making mischief. We proceed from joy; they only have their misery. -fax to Charlotte Rep, March 20, 1996

Well, I don't live in New York and I don't pretend to understand the way the theater works there.

The wonderful thing about Food for Thought is that it lets you keep your hand in theater and be in front of a live audience without a commitment of six months, or even three months.

Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.

Scarlet's Dancing Monkey of Fiery Doom

Pirates of Penzance

I fear that there will be no neat ending to this, in the manner of the old Greek plays. Where the Gods descend, and all is explained, and tidied away.

let me understand this musical theater nonsense—you're being gay for credit, right?

I too have lost audience members. Six million have left the theater.

As you know, six nights a week we gather together to sing songs we know and love, to dance, to escape our daily lives. But on the seventh night … God created Yiddish theater.

I became the stage for the great argument between Nietzsche and Rousseau. I was the extra ready to take on all the roles.

They say pantomime's a lost art. It's never been a lost art and never will be, because it's too natural to do.

An actor is an actor is an actor. The less personality an actor has off stage the better. A blank canvas on which to draw the characters he plays.

Politics with me isn't theater. It's performance art. Sometimes, for its own sake.

The work of art is a stuffed crocodile.

With respect to the requirement of art, the probable impossible is always preferable to the improbable possible.

It was one of those plays in which all of the actors unfortunately enunciated very clearly.