Theatre Quotes

I think actors have a greater responsibility when doing comedy. It's as easy as anything to get cheap laughs, but that's not the idea at all. "The slight trip syndrome," we call it. With tragedy one can get away with things a bit more because audiences don't always know how to react.

I have no intention of uttering my last words on the stage. Room service and a couple of depraved young women will do me quite nicely for an exit.

Designers play with scale and proportion, making the ordinary extraordinary by taking an object out of context and changing its scale in relation to the characters' size and appearance.

The artistic director gratifies his special need to relate to people in a highly accentuated paternalistic and maternalistic fashion.

The most precious things in speech are pauses.

In Shakespeare, keep it simple. Don't over-inflect. The speech needs to be naturalistic and simple and accessible as much as possible.

In a backstage interview during “The Taming of the Shrew,” Julia exclaims, “Some people think the only way to do Shakespeare is to do it like the British do it, because the British have the answer to Shakespeare! So I would imitate all the British.” He launches into a plummy version of “Othello,” and continues, “But then afterward I started realizing that I didn’t have to do it like that. I could bring myself to it. I could bring my own culture, my own Puerto Rican background, my own Spanish culture, my own rhythms.” Shakespeare benefitted from what Julia brought to his verse, which the actress Rita Moreno describes as salero. “It just means he was spicy,” she says, in the documentary. “And sexy, and tall!”

I open with a clock striking, to beget an awful attention in the audience -- it also marks the time, which is four o clock in the morning, and saves a description of the rising sun, and a great deal about gilding the eastern hemisphere.

If I wanted to have people tell me what to do, I would have become an actor.