Quotes About Theater

The theater is a need for me. It's a terrible attraction, something I'm compelled to do. And one derives a form of nourishment from the theater which you can never get from films. Making films weakens you in some way. With the theater, the work itself is a regenerative process.

I've been a little disappointed in directors in America. I'm really after a theater that doesn't just deal with the actual texts that I brought in. But with a director that really deals with images too, that takes the play to another level. We have to remember that theater takes place in the third dimension, and we have to take into consideration the visual aspect of the play. I think images are important for the theater. Because I do write images.

I studied theater in college, and I absolutely knew that I loved acting, and I knew that I loved theater.

The theater's been very good to me and I became Julie Halston through the theater.

I have a children's theater background, so I grew up performing for child audiences; it's sort of my specialty. I know the child audience pretty well - or felt like I did because I performed for them so much. I studied a lot about the child audience, about theater. So it was naturally a place that I gravitated to.

I came to America to become an architect. And somewhere along the line while I was still in school, I was lured into theater, and that's how I became interested in theater. My first play was something called "A Banquet for the Moon." It was a weird play.

It may be unfathomable in architecture, but it is very practical, or routine, for a person in theater to use action. You have the line, "Come home, son," but you can't play that line by going out and being a mother; you can't be a noun. But you can play to smother your son; you can play to grovel to your son. Again, the real information is carried in action. And, to an annoying degree, theater people talk to each other in infinitive expressions. If you don't have a vivid verb to describe what you're doing, you're probably going to be a pretty bad actress.

When I was in college, I was in the theater department, which for anyone who has been involved in any kind of theater program, you know that it's really wacky and tight-knit, a real family. Me and my good friends from college would do random shows and plays that were sometimes serious, but most of the time really goofy and funny.

I think one of the things that is important, for me, though a lot of people would disagree with me, is that you be founded in theater so that you understand what an audience is, what kind of an animal it is and how to play with it. How to have fun with it, how to sympathize with it, all the things that an audience is. I don't think you're going to find that out unless you do theater.

I wasn't a trained actor, I was trained in musical comedy theater, and when you do that, the audience is completely part of the thing. It's like Elizabethan theater. You play the scene, and then you turn - the audience is part of it.

Young people have got to start their own theaters, really. All good theater is a kind of mom-and-pop operation. Start your own theater.

I have always wanted to work in the theater. I've always felt the glamour of being backstage and that excitement, but I've never actually done it - not since I was in 5th grade, really. But I've had many plays in my films. I feel like maybe theater is a part of my movie work.

In my theater pieces, I would do "Tits on the Head" - Polaroid photos for $10 on the stage. There would be a line of folks paying me $10 for their turn. It was public prostitution. I turned my whole audience into johns. But because it was in a theater context, an art context, it was socially acceptable.

In the theater, actors are the essential element of the work. In a film, it's a real collaboration - not that theater isn't, because it is - but it's a collaboration to such an extent that you can give a performance in film that sometimes you look at and you go, "Well, that's not the performance I was trying to give at all."

I'm conflicted with theater in the city because you want to reach a diverse audience, and that audience doesn't typically go to the theater.

Printed prose is historically a most peculiar, almost an aberrant way of telling stories, and by far the most inherently anesthetic: It is the only medium of art I can think of which appeals directly to none of our five senses. The oral and folk tradition in narrative made use of verse or live-voice dynamics, embellished by gesture and expression--a kind of rudimentary theater--as do the best raconteurs of all times. Commonly there was musical accompaniment as well: a kind of one-man theater-of-mixed-means.

I want to do theater and I am looking forward to doing more Television and Movies. I also want to direct some plays in theater workshops for people with disabilities.

I knew I wanted to pursue a career in the theater the minute I graduated from college having not pursued it! So I went back to school and got a degree in music and began working in musical theater.

My preference is live performance. Because you get the feedback. There's an energy. It's live theater. That's why I think actors like that. You know, musicians need it, comedians definitely need it. It doesn't matter what size and what club, whether it's 30 people in the club or 2,000 in a hall or a theater. It's live, it's symbiotic, you need it.

I think movies are a director's medium in the end. Theater is the actor's medium. Theater is fast, and enjoyable, and truly rewarding. I believe in great live performance.

It's quite clear if you look at the actors in film right now, some of them came from theater but they didn't come from musical theater. There's still a bit of a stigma attached to it I would say.

The greatest experience I've ever had in a movie theater was watching "Star Wars." It shaped how I look at the world. My imagination was so small before I went in that theater and there was an explosion in my head. I just couldn't figure out how someone came up with it.

I think film is a world of directors. Theater is a world of actors.

Bangladesh is a world of metaphor, of high and low theater, of great poetry and music. You talk to a rice farmer and you find a poet. You get to know a sweeper of the streets and you find a remarkable singer.

It sounds corny to say, but the theater is sacred; something transcendent can occur, and when it does, everyone grows. It's a true communion.

What interested me in film was the image-making aspect of it. So, I went to school in cinematography. I was really convinced that image was what I wanted to do, and I think it came from the fact that I lived in a small town my whole life, but my mother was very interested in painting, so she would bring us to Paris for two weeks. So, we're going to the Louvre and to the museums and to see shows. In the evening we were seeing theater. Painting is basically what led me. I think the image was key.

I'd never done any film or television. Well, I'd done one little stupid commercial in Boston when I was doing theater, but that was it.

Singing in Yiddish was a great thrill for me and came about through Joe Papp, the founder of The Public Theater.

In the theater, you act more of the time. In the movies, you get to act maybe 20 or 30 minutes of the day. I love acting in movies. It's just different.

eah, you don't get a lot of meatheads doing improvised theater to begin with, and that's always been my thing. I talk about the nerd/meathead dichotomy on my podcast a lot, but there was a time when I was doing UCB full-time and playing men's league rugby in New York City, and I was like the funniest, artsiest rugby player, and the bro-iest improv comedian. I've always managed to sort of be in both sides.

I really had spent my whole life playing soccer, and the fact that I was willing to give that up for theater, that told me I was moving in that direction.

I mean, the whole idea of movies was it was special to go to see; you went to a movie theater to see something that was magical and amazing, in a very special location.

I understood that I was not the best director in the world nor the worst director in the world. I realized that there is a very mysterious element to what works and what doesn't work in the theater. And it's good to know that from the beginning.

You pay to have a good time, you don't always want to pay to be schooled or sad or reminded how bad you got it. To me a movie theater ain't always the place for that.

Eugene O'Neil created an American theater, and Tennessee Williams taught it how to sing.

I did a play called 'On Golden Pond' in a dinner theater in Maine and then went to New York for a talent competition having put together a three-man juggling routine and some one-liners and I got myself an agent from that

I just like the continue doing what I've been doing. A melange of funny, straight drama, television, movies, a little theater here and there wouldn't hurt. So if I can keep doing that, I'll be a very happy person.

In a sense I feel very much a part of the cinema now in a way where when I come back to the theater now I feel like a visitor. The cinema is really what I enjoy. I want to do more independent movies.

Now in my theater training I showed no aptitude at all.

The smaller films just take a longer period of time to build their fan base because people don't see them as soon as they come out in the theater. They see them, after a period of years.

I wouldnt be the same actor if I couldnt do theater.

I've had a long association with the theater over the years but I had never produced a play and it was something that I'd always wanted to do.The movies moved away from dramas, and I think that I'm very excited by the opportunity to take smart writing that takes risks and see it on stage. It's exciting to see that engagement between the audience and the playwright.

I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them.

Well, Toronto, I consider to be the birthplace of my films. I've made three films and this is the third one to premiere here in the same theater on the same day at the same time - they are my audience. They're the people that I think about while I'm writing, directing, and editing. I specifically make movies for them.

I had a Jesuit education, and I consider acting and the theater as kind of a calling - a vocation.

Architecture is a social act and the material theater of human activity.

Im always interested in looking - historically - at how theater can animate history and how all of that can make us engage with our lives in an enriching way.

Politics, like theater, is one of those things where you've got to be wise enough to know when to leave.