Quotes About Theater

I want to keep working. I want to step away from young adult fiction. I want to do theater periodically - Farragut North reminded me how great it is. I started out in theater. I trained in theater and then I kind of fell into film and TV. I want to work with interesting artists, talented actors, talented directors, and talented scripts. Not necessarily leading roles.

Anyone can do theater, even actors. And theater can be done everywhere. Even in a theater.

Now the Gielgud Theater is a very famous old theater, because it was originally called the Globe, and the Globe is where my mother made her very first professional appearance in London, was at the Globe Theater.

I began writing for theater, and maybe because of that I've always thought of myself as a theater writer who does work in film sometimes.

When I was doing theater, I was very successful at believing that I was great, God's gift to the theater.

I grew up going to the theater. That was one of the nice things my mom did was she took us to plays and symphony concerts and to the museums. Theater captured my imagination. I just loved the idea of that box, which is essentially what a stage is from a certain distance, a box with all this life going on in it. So, I was eleven when I wrote my first play. Of course, it was horrible.

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 have never known a movement in the theater that did not work direct and serious harm. Indeed, I have sometimes felt that the very people associated with various uplifting activities in the theater are people who are astoundingly lacking in idealism.

An acting assistant stage manager in a theater in Canterbury, a rep theater. A small wage but just enough to get by on, and I made props, and I walked on, and I changed scenery, and I realized that I just loved it.

There tends to be this hierarchy of film and television, and theater is somewhere else in its own milieu. However, as actors, yes, we love to do theater because it's our story. Nobody can edit it, the curtain goes up, and it's ours for two hours or three, or whatever. And we tell it.

I not only loved studying theater, I loved being a theater major. It gave me an excuse to brood, to grow a beard, to wear black 'at' people. I didn't just want to play Hamlet, I wanted to be Hamlet.

I really think that people who want to think more serious have to go and watch theater. Theater is a very sterilized art form. Not as much as music, but very close to music.

I expect at some point I'll probably want to go back on stage and do some theater, because I've not done theater in 10 years.

I was a huge theater geek growing up, and that was not the easiest thing in the world, especially growing up in Chicago, where sports are really the norm. I was always off to the theater at night, from 7 years old on. Friends there in the Midwest who could talk to you about the idiosyncrasies of 'Pippin' were few and far between.

I don't have much to compare it to because I really didn't know much about theater. After I signed on, I started reading a lot of Sam Shepard plays just to brush up on my history and do some research. What's great is that Sam's been here and he's been in rehearsals with us. Sometimes you don't even notice him come in; he's just sitting there in the theater seats watching you.

Always continue to perform no matter what or where the activity is: local theater, regional theater, local clubs or coffee shops. Continue to play the guitar or your instrument and always continue to progress or otherwise you will fail.

The liveness of theater, and the excitement of experiencing it alongside an audience, is something you can't get at home. That makes the theater more vital than ever. It's definitely expensive, but I have faith that the market will keep recognizing the live experience as a valuable and important one.

When I was in high school, I was the guy directing plays after class. I started my first theater company at 19, and my second theater company at 21. I've always been a guy who doesn't do well with the passive nature of being an actor.

Most of the theater I've done in the past was when I was a kid or a teenager so it feels like being a kid again. I'm happier than I've ever been. You really get to go to work every day and play, and try different things. I don't know, I've never felt so lucky to do this job. So I hope to do a lot more theater.

The truth is that a lot of plays aren't political at all. In American theater history, political theater has tended to crop up when there's a crisis, a national crisis.

A lot of the time I hate the theater. You think, 'I have to climb Mount Everest, again, tonight.' Oh, the theater is a scary place to be.

In Michigan, if you want to act, it's local theater, it's high school theater and it's going to camp and putting on plays in the summer, and I always loved doing that. There was something that just drew me to it.

I did enjoy theater. I actually do prefer making films and television, but it was a learning experience for me, because I got into television at 5 and film at 11, and theater was something I completely bypassed.

Theater roles are written by the great masters. The greatest literature that you can possibly know are the theater roles like King Lear, Hamlet, and all of those great roles. So all you do is you dive into these unchallenged roles and see how far you can get, what kind of accolades you can get, and how good you can be in them. In movie roles, you can actually improve them by knowing a lot about your own stage technique, which helps a great deal in the cinema and how you can project inner humor even though the particular dialogue is not necessarily funny, but you can infuse it with humor.

In actor's career, I had a fair amount of denial, which I think is possibly in the genes, where I just couldn't go to, "Maybe this won't work out." I just couldn't do it. My mind just refused to go there. I don't mean there weren't low periods. There were plenty. But I remember arriving in New York and I was maybe 32, and I didn't have an agent. I came from Chicago, where I had gone to school and worked and got my sea legs, so to speak, and I remember walking out of the subway, walking the streets, standing in front of the theater and saying, "I will work in this theater."

Becoming interested in poetics got me interested in theater. Theater is supposed to be poetry, you know, before it's anything else. It just doesn't fly if it isn't musical.

When you're on TV, you come into people's homes. In theater and film, they go to you - to the temple of the cinema or theater. And it's very different.

The whole idea of action being a carrier of information is something that comes directly from theater. That's, in some ways, the one thing I've been trying to contribute. I still write things outside of architecture - not really fiction, but not nonfiction. I like dialogue as a form, because the text is only the trace of an action. The consequential information is carried in the action you choose to put on that text.

I've done a ton of theater work and dramatic work, but nobody really knows me that way.

We film in front of a live audience, and I was a theater actor before I got into television, so I like that.

I'd come up with one leg in theater, but never my first leg. I loved the camera too much.

I did tons of theater in school, and then when I was 16 and got my driver's license, I started driving to Los Angeles, along with my friend Eric Stoltz, who was a year ahead of me and was doing the same thing. So we had the same manager, and we started auditioning for things and doing commercials when we were 16.

No more duty can be urged upon those who are entering the great theater of life than simple loyalty to their best convictions.

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.

We don't make movies for critics. I've done four movies; there's millions upon millions upon millions of people who've paid to see them. Somebody likes them. My greatest joy is to sit anonymously in a dark theater and watch it with an audience, a paying audience.

My father is an actor, so he brought me into his agency when I was young. It wasn't something I wanted to do until high school, when I started taking theater and really liked it. Then an agent found me and wanted me to come out to Los Angeles and give it a shot. I gave myself six months, but it only took me like a week to get a job.

Well, I'm half Australian, half English and I live in London. That is the only reason I came upon this story. My Australian mother, Meredith Hooper, was invited in late 2007 by some Australian friends to make up a token Australian audience in a tiny fringe theater play reading of an unproduced, unrehearsed play called 'The King's Speech.

First I went to C.W. Post and I was a psychology and theater major and then I transferred to NYU's Tisch School of the Arts as a drama major.

Comedy people are always present because they're always looking for the funniest version of whatever the line is. Sometimes theater people, where scripts are sacrosanct, aren't quite as present in scenes. That's a massive generalization, but in my experience, I find that comedy people are great to improvise with and to do scenes with because they're there.

I find that with fantasy, you lose yourself in it a lot. It's great to be able to go into a dark theater or turn off the lights in your house and just get sucked into this world. I remember watching Star Wars when I was a little kid when they did the re-release of all the originals. I couldn't even read yet but my uncle took me and he would read me the opening as the words were coming up on the screen. I just remember being so sucked into that and thinking, "I want to be Luke Skywalker."

The terrible thing about acting in the theater is that you have to do it at night.

And Paul Moravec, not being a theater person, would always trust me when I said things that I am like, "you're going to need another 10 seconds of music year to get them across the stage." But I always knew that the people were going to be coming to hear his music of which my words are going to be a part. It was clear that he wanted to go and direction A., and I wanted to go and direction B. We would've gone and direction A. That's the most important piece of advice I can give to anybody who finds themselves in an opera, or musical comedy situation like that.

A lot of what I've had produced are plays, and I just don't want to do that. It's different than a movie, where you only have to act the scenes the one time, and you have other collaborators helping you make it better, so you don't feel as obsessed with your own mind. Plays you have to do every single night, and the thought of that is agony to me. There are days when you hate your own work, and you don't want to be confronted with that, have it coming out of your mouth or listening to somebody else say it to you. There are days you want to leave the theater and get a drink.

All my roots are Broadway. I got my Equity Card doing a Broadway show, and my first love is theater.

The universe is not for man alone, but is a theater of evolution for all living beings. Live and let live is its guiding principle. 'Ahimsa Paramo Dharmah' - Non-injury is the highest religion.

For my entire career, I wanted to be a director. When I was in the theater, it was very difficult to get directing jobs, and I fell into the acting by default. I got in the habit of accepting whatever came my way. Not things that I disagreed with, though. It's not like I had aspirations - well, I did have aspirations to play Hamlet, which I ended up doing.

I did a lot of theater growing up, and in college I was in the musical 'Chicago.'

I've done a lot of things with theater that I'm very, very proud of.