Theatre Quotes

Onstage, nothing is as important as truth, nothing. As soon as you lie, they know it.

You cannot tell an audience a lie. They know it before you do; before it's out of your mouth, they know it's a lie.

These performers that go on about their technique and craft - oh, puleeze! How boring! I don't know what 'technique' means. But I do know what experience is.

Act in your pauses.

Shakespeare's plays are bad enough, but yours are even worse. [Tolstoy to Chekov]

Show me a congenital eavesdropper with the instincts of a Peeping Tom and I will show you the making of a dramatist.

No theater could sanely flourish until there was an umbilical connection between what was happening on the stage and what was happening in the world.

Theater is life, film is art, television is furniture.

When it's good design, you alone will know. When it's bad design - everyone will tell you!

As nearly everyone knows, a manager has practically nothing to do except to decide what is to be done; to tell somebody to do it; to listen to reasons why it should not be done, why it should be done by someone else, or why it should be done in a different way; to follow up to see if the thing has been done; to discover that it has not; to inquire why; to listen to excuses from the person who should have done it; to follow up again to see if the thing has been done, only to discover that it has been done incorrectly; to point out how it should have been done; to conclude that as long as it has been done, it may as well be left where it is; to wonder if it is not time to get rid of a person who cannot do a thing right; to reflect that he or she probably has a family, and that certainly any successor would be just as bad, and maybe worse; to consider how much simpler and better the thing would have been done if one had done it oneself in the first place; to reflect sadly that one could have done it right in 20 minutes, and, as things turned out, one had to spend two days to find out why it has taken three weeks for somebody else to do it wrong.

Every performer has moments of self doubt. The great ones, however,overcome every obstacle to reach their full artistic potential. It takes talent, to be sure, but it also takes a personality that simply will not settle for second best. That's what makes us respect the effort and admire the results.

I think that first nights should come near the end of a play's run--as indeed, they often do.

A talent for drama is not a talent for writing, but is an ability to articulate human relationships.

The only way to see the value of a play is to see it acted.

Talk low, talk slow, and don't say too much.

I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won't contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That's what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.

The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster.

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.

An actor entering through the door, you've got nothing. But if he enters through the window, you've got a situation.