Quotes About Theater

Be ambitious. The great actor, director and playwright Ann Jellicoe commissioned writers like Howard Barker and David Edgar, and put on magnificent, large-scale plays in Dorset that involved the whole community.

The economics of theater are painful. I still think that the theater community should be looking much more rigorously at how to let the playwright keep the money they make.

The ideas of the great playwrights are almost always larger than the experiences of even the best actors.

Like most playwrights, I hate talkbacks with a passion that can burn a hole through hell.

If you love classical playwrights, seek out companies or places that are doing that. If you love modern playwrights, try to find groups who are writing new plays or working on new plays. If you love television, watch as much theater and film as you can.

When I was in school, I didn't get exposed to Latino playwrights.

Male playwrights, on the whole, are probably more interested in male characters. They need women characters to be the women in their lives or to be the domestic difficulty.

'Carousel,' please! I would die to do that.

I think about the audience in the sense that I serve as my own audience. I have to please myself the way, if I saw the movie in a theater, I would be pleased. Do I think about catering to an audience? No.

I'm acting for the pleasure of it.

Before I do a play I say that I hope it's going to be for as short a time as possible but, once you do it, it is a paradoxical pleasure. One evening out of two there are five minutes of a miracle and for those five minutes you want to do it again and again. It's like a drug.

I don't mind doing the green-screen stuff at all, and in fact it's a lot like black-box theater, which I did plenty of in New York.

When you get to set, you don't try to play the plot; you just play the character.

Character is plot, and casting is character.

I think with musicals, it's much more part of the script. They don't want songs that would stop the show; they need songs that keep the plot moving.

Movies are all about plot. Theater, even if it's story heavy, it's about ideas. Theater has to resonate in your heart in a way that movies don't.

I've been going to school, did theater for a long time, been plugging away for 10, 15 years. I was told earlier in my career, it's all laying track... one day, all that track is going to come together in some way, and it has.

I see theater as a simple formula. Audience plus players plus story makes the play.

When I was doing 'A Disappearing Number' in Plymouth, we had to go on an hour and a half late, and I still hadn't written an end, so we had to make one up, and then we had to go out literally with our pants round our ankles.

I feel like any single woman of color who's been onstage has a Shakespeare monologue in her back pocket, and a monologue from 'For Colored Girls.' It's just part of what you should have, as a woman of color.

I was actually a poetry major in college before I punted and decided to become a theater major. I wrote the poem that we put on the sauerkraut boxes in the style of Elling.

My mother was an actress and a director, as well. And my father was a playwright and poet.

When I finished high school, I didn't have much direction - I was a Deadhead kid who ended up bumming around London seeing a lot of theater. That's where I saw the performance that made me want to act: Vanessa Redgrave doing 'A Touch of the Poet.'

'Baskets' is incredible - 'Baskets' is so funny and poignant and sad and dark.