Quotes About Theater

I started performing in high school. There was a pretty great drama department at my school, and that's when I started doing plays and musicals.

I did plays in high school and I really loved it, but I think singing was always what I loved most of all.

I went to Northwestern in Chicago, in Evanston, and then I ended up trickling down in Chicago theater. I did a bunch of plays, but I was non-equity. For a lot of people, non-equity means you're not yet professional. But for me, if you're in a mainstream theater, you're doing something real.

The heart of the theater is the play itself, how it dramatizes life to make it meaningful entertainment. To achieve depth and universality, the playwright must subject himself to intense critique, to know human character and behavior, and finally to construct art from the most mundane of human experience.

My plays aren't stylistically the same. Just being an African-American woman playwright on Broadway is experimental.

I'm one of those lazy actors; I like to take what the playwright wrote and work with that.

As a playwright, you are a torturer of actors and of the audience as well. You inflict things on people.

Shakespeare was very political, but he was also a fabulous entertainer. That's where his genius comes in as a playwright.

I think a playwright realizes after he finishes working on the script that this is only the beginning. What will happen when it moves into three dimensions?

I think I'll always be a better playwright than a pundit, but I believe that writers should be public intellectuals and that theater, even more than film, is a place of public debate.

There's a very famous South African playwright named Athol Fugard, and I'd be in any play he's ever did.

If you are in an Edward Albee play, you say Edward Albee is the greatest playwright of all time... If you're in an Israel Horovitz play, you say Israel Horovitz is the greatest playwright of all time.

Necessarily, I'm always involved in casting, as any playwright is, because the whole process of putting on a play is a collaborative, organic effort on the part of a bunch of people trying to think alike.

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.

It's very hard to be a playwright because it's very competitive.

In theater, the playwright is the boss, period. The decisions will go through him or her. In movies, the writer is pretty far down on the list.

I enjoy all forms of writing, but playwrighting is what made me what I am. Not only working with the ghosts of Chekhov and Ibsen and Shakespeare, but what it is to be a playwright, to be interacting with human beings in the live theater and affect people on such a direct, emotional level.

I'm not a playwright; I'm a writer who loves theater.

The economics of being a playwright are abysmal. I like to think of the work I do out in Hollywood as a way to actually make a life in the theater easier.

I'm an actor and a playwright, and I don't earn much.

I'm a playwright who gets involved in movies when I'm not writing a play.

You can't be a playwright without believing there's an audience for adventurous work.

I was a theatre major and started off as a playwright.

It's a lucky life to be a playwright.