Theatre Quotes
For use in newsletters, season or fundraising brochures or emails, presentations--you name it.
| Category | Quote | First | Last | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| General |
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. |
Aristotle | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips | |
| General |
The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything -- gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness -- rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations. To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre. |
Antonin | Artaud | |
| General, Playwriting |
Good plays drive bad playgoers crazy. |
Brooks | Atkinson | Theatre Arts Aug 56 |
| Acting, Directing, General |
Although the theater is not life, it is composed of fragments or imitations of life, and people on both sides of the footlight have to unite to make the fragments whole and the imitations genuine. |
Brooks | Atksinson | |
| Playwriting |
Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman when in fact she is my mother, that this person is a chambermaid when it is a young nobleman in disguise, that this well-dressed young man is rich when he is really a penniless adventurer, or that if I do this such and such a result will follow when in fact it results in something very different. All good drama has two movements, first the making of the mistake, then the discovery that it was a mistake. |
W.H. | Auden | |
| General, Playwriting |
The theatre is a gross art, built in sweeps and over-emphasis. Compromise is its second name. |
Enid | Bagnold | |
| Acting |
Acted drama requires surrender of one's self, sympathetic absorption in the play as it develops. |
George P. | Baker | http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/g/georgepba199310.html |
|
A play is a series of actions. A play is not about action, nor does it describe action. Is a fire about flames? Does it describe flames? No, a fire is flames. A play is action. Why do you think actors are called actors? And action in a play occurs when something happens that makes or permits something else to happen. |
David | Ball | Backwards & Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays | |
| Acting |
It's one of the tragic ironies of the theatre that only one man in it can count on steady work -- the night watchman. |
Tallulah | Bankhead | Tallulah: My Autobiography |
| Acting |
If you want to help the American theatre, don't be an actress, be an audience. |
Tallulah | Bankhead | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
