Quotes About Theatre

More than anything else, I love to act and leave the rest to my director.

The theatre at my school was awesome. It was a 1,400-seat auditorium, so, being in that auditorium at 17, and having, like, 1,400 people cheer for you was, like, one of the most amazing feelings that I've ever felt, energy-wise. It just felt right.

I've gotten to perform in the most beautiful places, like the Nourse Theatre in San Francisco.

They used a hard vocabulary to contain the terrible softness. Greased they'd say. Offed, lit up, zapped while zipping. It wasn't cruelty, just stage presence. They were actors. When someone died, it wasn't quite dying, because in a curious way it seemed scripted, and because they had their lives mostly memorized, irony mixed with tragedy, and because they called it by other names, as if to encyst and destroy the reality of death itself.

Rosencrantz: Shouldn't we be doing something--constructive? Guildenstern: What did you have in mind? ... A short, blunt human pyramid...?

Actors! The mechanics of cheap melodrama! That isn't death! You scream and choke and sink to your knees but it doesn't bring death home to anyone- it doesn't catch them unawares and start the whisper in their skulls that says- 'One day you are going to die.

HENSLOWE: Mr. Fennyman, let me explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster. Believe me, to be closed by the plague is a bagatelle in the ups and downs of owning a theatre. FENNYMAN: So what do we do? HENSLOWE: Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well. FENNYMAN: How? HENSLOWE: I don't know, it's a mystery.

The Almost Free Theatre, the Fun Art Bus and the rest of them were phenomena of a decade which was simultaneously playful and desperately serious; and

After Magritte often serves as a companion piece to The Real Inspector Hound, which I think is appropriate in at least one way: neither play is about anything grander than itself. A

The 'role of the theatre' is much debated (by almost nobody, of course), but the thing defines itself in practice first and foremost as a recreation. This seems satisfactory. TOM STOPPARD 1993

Doctrine is less theoretical than it is theatrical, a matter of doing—speaking and showing—what we have heard and understood.

I did a play called Throne of Straw when I was 11, at the Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles. It became really clear to me at that point that I enjoyed acting more than any other experience I was having.

The wildest and most moving dramas are played not in the theatre but in the hearts of ordinary men.

The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form.

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic... The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.

Music is only sound expressing certain patterns, so to what extent is that sound architecture and to what extent theatre?

My playground was the theatre. I'd sit and watch my mother pretend for a living. As a young girl, that's pretty seductive.

Theatre and opera were always the twin kingdoms that I felt I had to conquer, because they were my parents' favorites.

I always say to my Twitter followers to come to the stage door and meet me. What I love about being in the theatre, rather than filming, is that you meet your audience.

Theatre is different. We can spend two weeks around a table talking about subtext. In opera, there is a score, and people already know their parts. And they move differently. I find all this liberating.

As a performer, once you've understood the genre of musical theatre, you can tire very quickly of the two-dimensional stuff. With Sondheim, it's always a challenge. It's difficult and exhilarating and he's so good on the complexities of relationships and on things going wrong.

The theatre show-biz types don't change much, no matter what era we're in. The question of how you balance being in show business with your personal life isn't very different.

I'm from a typical middle-class family and I grew up in a place without a theatre.

In theatre, the uglier you are, the better actor you are.