Theatre Quotes

Look, I'm over 40, I'm single, and I work in musical theater - you do the math!

I will accept anything in the theatre . . . provided it amuses or moves me. But if it does neither, I want to go home.

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

A good play is a play which when acted upon the boards make an audience interested and pleased. A play that fails in this is a bad play.

On the stage he was natural, simple, affecting;/ 'Twas only that when he was off he was acting.

If Hitler's still alive, I hope he's out of town with a musical. [variously attributed]

To save the theatre, the theatre must be destroyed, the actors and actresses must all die of the plague. They poison the air, they make art impossible. It is not drama that they play, but pieces for the theatre. We should return to the Greeks, play in the open air; the drama dies of stalls and boxes and evening dress, and people who come to digest their dinner.

The virtue of dress rehearsals is that they are a free show for a select group of artists and friends of the author, and where for one unique evening the audience is almost expurgated of idiots.

It hath evermore been the notorious badge of prostituted Strumpets and the lewdest Harlots, to ramble abroad to Plays, to Playhouses; whither no honest, chaste or sober Girls or Women, but only branded Whores and infamous Adulteresses, did usually resort in ancient times.

Ultimately, in order to have theatre reflect the world as it is, the industry must value the artists that it has historically marginalized, and start by redirecting resources to support these artists’ work and lives—a move that could both make theatre a more inclusive space for both artists and audiences.

You can throw away the privilege of acting, but that would be such a shame. The tribe has elected you to tell its story. You are the shaman/healer, that's what the storyteller is, and I think it's important for actors to appreciate that. Too often actors think it's all about them, when in reality it's all about the audience being able to recognize themselves in you.

Acting is not a state of being ... but a state of appearing to be. You can't be eight times a week without going stark staring mad. You've got to be in control.

No one makes you write plays; the world could sort of get along without me turning out a play every year, so I do this because I enjoy it enormously. It gives me great pleasure, and working in the theatre is, I think its own reward.

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.

The primary function of a theater is not to please itself, or even to please its audience. It is to serve talent.

Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might have -- by disrupting that order -- a way of surprising.

A playwright is the litmus paper of the arts. He's got to be, because if he isn't working on the same wave length as the audience, no one would know what in hell he was talking about. He is a kind of psychic journalist, even when he's great.

Good drama must be drastic.

A dramatist is one who believes that the pure event, an action involving human beings, is more arresting than any comment that can be made upon it.

The subjective actress thinks of clothes only as they apply to her; the objective actress thinks of them only as they affect others, as a tool for the job.

I don't see why people want new plays all the time. What would happen to concerts if people wanted new music all the time?

Acting expresses a part of the self otherwise hidden to the conscious mind.

Actors are the only honest hypocrites.

The play loses a great deal of its meaning if it is robbed of a magic which springs, not from the glittering tip of a department-store wand, but from the earth, the stones, the very air of the wood; and a magic which is not merely pretty but dark and dangerous. [said of A Midsummer Night's Dream

What is the main problem of the actor? It is to keep the audience awake, and not let them go to sleep, then wake up and go home feeling they've wasted their money.

It is the characteristic of the most stringent censorships that they give credibility to the opinions they attack.

Acting is experience with something sweet behind it.

A lot of what acting is paying attention.

All action in theatre must have inner justification, be logical, coherent, and real.