Quotes About Theater

Once you've been backstage at a theater, the theater is never the same for you. Once you've noticed the crack in the vase, the vase is never the same for. Once you've seen a friend do something appalling, the friendship is never the same. That does not mean you won't go to the theater, or keep the vase or the friend. You can choose.

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.

In terms of theater itself, no story is too strange or method of telling it too impossible these days. In many ways, musical theater has caught up with straight theater in that it's allowed more surreality and breaking of form, and that's really exciting to me - the challenge is getting people to produce those shows.

My background is in theater. I was a theater major in college.

I come from a theater family and a theater background, and I come from a philosophy that you respect the space you occupy when you work and you put everything that you have into something.

When I was in New York after I left the Army, I studied for two years at the American Theater Wing, studied acting, which involved dance and fencing and speech classes and history of theater, all that.

My return to the theater in New York was so specific. I didn't want it to be about leveraging my exposure or my fame, so the first show I did in New York was an ensemble piece at an Off-Broadway theater, and I wanted to make sure that it was just about the play and about the experience.

Radio is the theater of the mind; television is the theater of the mindless.

My relationship with Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm reaches far back into my childhood. I grew up with Grimm's fairy tales. I even saw a theater production of 'Tom Thumb' during Advent at the State Theater in Danzig, which my mother took me to see.

I love big, bold, truthful theater - the tradition of Victorian theater.

I've always loved fairy tales. I think they perhaps led me to theater rather than the other way around. As a child I wanted to invent a machine that could record my dreams, so I could watch them in the morning; or hire someone to draw the things I had in my head, because I knew I didn't have the skill to do it myself. Theater is that machine. I can make these images come to life and actually walk around inside them for a while.

In high school, theater was all I ever wanted to do. I didnt see that I was going to set it aside for so many years and take a right turn into television. Of course, wanting to do theater is something you hear a lot from actors. I think Ive been embarrassed to be in that big cliche.

Film is very much about capturing the essence of things - if you feel it, and you've got the right person shooting it, it'll come across. Theater's a different animal; it's physically different and requires a different discipline. In the theater, you're mining the same material, constantly honing the same thing, executing it and keeping it alive and fresh.

Field of Dreams is the only movie - and I saw it in the theater - on an afternoon when I was on location somewhere, and there were like 12 people in the theater. I was just so devastated; I couldn't get out of my seat. And I sat and watched it a second time.

Once in a while there were things in screenwriting that taught me things for fiction. But there's nothing in screenwriting that teaches you anything for the theater. I'm not sure I've ever fully appreciated before how different a form theater is.

I think the theater work and the on-camera work feed off each other. My theater work has become more simple, and my on-camera work has become more energized or more spontaneous.

London's Windmill Theater grew famous for its nude tableaux. During the 1940 and 1950, this theater overcame the objections of censors by agreeing that none of its naked actors would move any part of his/her body.

My older sister has all her degrees in theater, and I couldnt stand the theater geeks!

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.

I didn't go into the theater to be a producer, I went into the theater to be a director.

We're trying to get as many people to become interested in seeing it, but if you like the theater and you're interested in seeing what live theater looks like in New York, you probably already set your DVR. It's gonna be a hard ask to get a bunch of college-basketball fans to tune in for three hours to watch the Tonys.

From a young age, I had done a lot of theater and musical theater. I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do with my life, but every time I was away from acting, I just felt very incomplete and a little stir crazy.

Surely, you go to the theater because you want to have a great evening in the 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.

A lot of the best acting training I had was in junior high and high school. We had very demanding directors and did real plays. You put our plays up against any theater troupe of any age, and they usually did pretty damn well.

You can't show a four-hour movie in a theater, really.

We went on the opening weekend [of Star Wars], a group of us went out and just popped into a couple theaters just to see people in the theater watching the movie, and it was incredibly gratifying just to see the thing out there being watched by people. And the reaction was more than we could've expected.

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.

The projectors in the theater practically shut down with boredom.

I think there are rock stars within every subgenre, and for people who are obsessed with musical theater Sutton Foster and Audra MacDonald are like Beyonce to them. I'm sure the a cappella world has their own version of that, and that exists in every geeky subculture.

In theater, the playwright is the boss, period. The decisions will go through him or her. In movies, the writer is pretty far down on the list.

In the theater lying is looked upon as an occupational disease.

I grew up in the time just when cassettes were waning and CDs were growing. And so mix tapes - and not mix CDs - mix tapes were an important part of the friendship and mating rituals of New York adolescents. If you were a girl and I wanted you - to show you I like you, I would make you a 90-minute cassette wherein I would show off my tastes. I would play you a musical theater song next to a hip-hop song next to an oldie next to some pop song you maybe never heard, also subliminally telling you how much I like you with all these songs.

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 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.

I did an Off-Broadway show that was a comedy written by Ann Meara. We were like a family, and we did that show for a year. On Oz, I did feel like the cast members were friends and there was a lot of bonding. That said, there was a lot of testosterone. Once again, it was full of really intense theater actors with this writing that was really intricate and subtle.

Cary Grant was wonderful to work with on stage. He would move downstage, so that as he looked at me the audience had to look at me, too. He knew a lot about the theater and how to move around. He was very secure.

I think I'll always be a better playwright than a pundit, but I believe that writers should be public intellectuals and that theater, even more than film, is a place of public debate.

The theater, when it is potent enough to deserve its ancestry, is always dangerous; that is why it is instinctively feared by people who do not want change, but only preservation of the status quo.

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.

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.

If you want to see theater you go to New York.

That's something you can't get off the wires in New York is people providing intelligent coverage of what your theater company in Podunk is up to. Many of the people who write what we call amateur criticism are professionals in anything other than name and receiving a paycheck. Very often, they know more than the professional critic who might be writing for their local newspaper. So, really, I'm all for it. It's changing the playing field, it's shaking things up, it's going to make the critical environment a healthier environment.

I live halfway between reality and theater at all times. And I was born this way.

You can be a little bit darker and rougher on the stage, partly because when you're in the theater, people have come to see you, and so they kind of know what they're in for. In television, you are sort of sneaking into people's homes. So, I think you can be a little bit darker on stage.

I didn't really know much about the Houdinis when I started. As soon as they sent me the script, I wanted to find out everything I could about Bess. Luckily, I have a really wonderful friend named Michael Mitnick, who's a writer. He was a magician as a child, and that led him to the theater, which led to drama school, and he writes films now. Magic was really his thing, growing up, so he put me in touch with his magic teacher who is a real Houdini expert.

In theater, the scenes I like the most are the ones where you are there and you cannot talk.