Quotes About Theater

I was a creative kid; I wasn't really into sports, and sports in the South are a pretty big deal. It's like a religion down there. It was tough to find my footing, but thankfully, my parents discovered, through a neighbor, this theater called Young Actors Theater and signed me up for the summer program. It really was a gift. Even if a kid doesn't go into acting or the arts like I did, some kids need that environment to find themselves and find what they love to do. I'm so thankful for that theater; it was a big gift to me.

I feel like there's an obsession with pace right now in theater, with things being very fast and very witty and very loud, and I think we're all so freaked out about theater keeping audiences interested because everybody's so freaked out about theater becoming irrelevant.

I was there when the quote-unquote golden age of musical theater was flourishing. I met everybody who worked in theater or was famous in theater from the '40s on.

A theater is being given over to market forces, which means that a whole generation that should be able to do theater as well as see it is being completely deprived

What I like about theater is its team work. Theater is also all-time creativity.

I love theater. I think theater, when its done right, is the best, like a religious experience. When it is done badly, it's the worst thing. It's just an incredible experience.

Theater doesn't bring money in general. That's not why you do it. If you go into theater for money then you've really gone into the wrong business.

I worked a lot in Chicago's theater scene as a fight choreographer. And so I do have a lot of experience in stage combat and also in Kabuki dance and Kabuki theater.

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.

Actors and writers need to come back to the theater because it's a place where you can learn. You have to pay your dues; and people who haven't paid their dues in the theater, I think, have a hard time creating a whole career.

My mother was an extraordinary theater actor in Canada, and when I would finish school, I would go to the theater. I would do my homework, we would have dinner there, she would do her play, and then me and my sister would go home. So I grew up in it that way.

My mother had been an actress and we came from that world in New York, the theater world and the downtown sort of theater scene, and so I guess we didn't really have what you'd call like a Hollywood kind of life at all.

I really wanted to go back to the theater, the live theater. That was the thing I had never had a chance to do, even though I had trained to be a stage actress.

We all know that the theater and every play that comes to Broadway have within themselves, like the human being, the seed of self-destruction and the certainty of death. The thing is to see how long the theater, the play, and the human being can last in spite of themselves.

I'm somebody who grew up listening to a lot of musical theater, so getting to finally write musical theater songs and songs that sound that way - the emphasis being on the storytelling, but the arrangements and the orchestrations can be really varied - I found that to be, actually, a really joyful discovery.

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 dropped out in middle school. I dropped out in, towards the beginning of the ninth grade. And then I started studying -I started taking acting classes at a, well first I was like in a community theater at that time in Torrance, California, so I finished up like my season with that community theater just acting in, you know, acting in a small part on this play or a big part on that play or a stage manager or assistant stage manager in another play.

Rip Torn thought I was being a wise guy, and one afternoon he got pretty angry with me after telling me to do something and he thought I was pretending like I didn't know what he meant.But he was very frustrated. He was very frustrated as a director in trying to get his little theater group going. It was called The Sanctuary Theater Workshop, I think, and he wanted to do these classical plays by people like August Strindberg, and he was fighting hard to get his show up and be good and be professional.

Theater in Chicago will always be my first love. It started careers for me and about 50 of my friends. We all love coming back. As soon as the TV show is over, I'll be back in Chicago, doing live theater.

I am a theater girl, and a lot of theater girls dress however pleases them. I wear whatever looks good on me. I wear what I wear because I have been shopping at thrift stores since I was five.

I've always been singing. Since day one. I started doing musical theater and you have to sing in musical theater and so that's where I got most of my training. So singing on stage, you just inevitably, when you're around other vocal artists, you get better at singing.

Theater will never, and never has, gotten audiences like film. But theater goes to work on society in a different and more subversive way.

I love theater. I grew up doing theater.

I've always loved film more than theater, and film may be more closely related to making a record because you have that ability to go in and do your work and have no judgment around it, and feel honest. Then, much later, it's presented to people. But in theater, people come backstage after a performance and you're about to do the same play again the next night, and people say, "Well, I didn't really believe that emotion" or whatever. It's really hard for me, I like to be closed up and just do the work.

For me, art is always a kind of theater. When I started the spot paintings I made them as an endless series. But I was never serious about it being an endless series. It was just an implied endless series. The theater means you just have to make it look good for that moment in the spotlight.

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.

I see myself as not a typical theater person, but a person who uses the theater as a place to meet people and explore ideas.

The theater has to impose itself on the public, and not the public on the theater... The word "Art" should be written everywhere, in the auditorium and in the dressing rooms, before the word "Business" gets written there.

I am more alive in the theater than anywhere else, but what I take into the theater I get from the streets.

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.

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

As soon as people enter a theater they must become moron consumers who must be fed information.

The most reliable pleasure afforded by theater is the intermission.

Ninety-seven saint days a year wouldn't affect the theater, but two Yom Kippurs would ruin it.

Promises are like crying babies in a theater, they should be carried out at once.

One particular night I was at the theater. I was not scouting for a project, but I was touched by this play by Évelyne de la Chenelière. I was touched by the character. I thought it was a rich character that could be rich enough for a movie.

I love all of the arts. I love motion pictures. I love stage. I love theater.

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."

I come from a traditional theater background.

I'm very resistant to most forms of theater.

I was coming from a theater background. I had an obsession with classic film and cool, interesting, intelligent television. I didn't really understand the way the mainstream television industry worked. I just thought "The wire is so good that it's going to be a huge hit, and we'll get awards up the yin-yang forever." That's what I thought!

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.

I grew up in such a small area that there really weren't any acting classes. So I had to wait till I got to college, at the University of Washington. I was a theater major there and got my training. Then after college, I packed up my Honda Civic and kind of fulfilled the cliché of driving down to Los Angeles, and literally, brick by brick - you know, the slow and painful way - I built my career.

I love theater: I can do shows that are completely different from one another. Altar Boyz had heavy dance moves, but also a comic edge to it. And now I'm utilizing all my physical skills: jumping on walls, doing pratfalls and bits and huge takes. My whole show is basically lining up one bit after the next.

Theater in Chicago will always be my first love.

I perform regularly with a theater company called Outside the Wire who take performances of Greek tragedy to American-military audiences around the world to create discussion about PTSD and soldier suicide. It's one of the greatest things I've ever been asked to do as an actor.

Audiences and, to a large extent, critics who want less from theater than it is possible for it to give. If everybody's encouraged to want less, you'll end up with less.