Quotes About Theater

I've been working in theater, really, since about 1965. I started working with the Mabou Mines about then, and in a way I've always worked in the theater, but it's never been a main part of my work. And it wasn't until Einstein that I kind of shifted into high gear with theater, working with Bob, with Bob Wilson. And since then I find it a very attractive form to work in. It's just an extension of my work.

I'd always loved the theater, and I began by writing plays. I work in the theater a lot in the UK, and I've worked in the theater out here quite a bit. Everything else - the films - followed as a consequence of that.

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

I love the theater and I particularly love the classical theater and I love doing Shakespeare. It pays the soul, but it doesn't pay the rent.

I cannot control what you bring into the theater when you see the film. I can't control what my parents bring in. I can't control what some random person on Twitter brings in to the theater. All I can control is the hour and 50 minutes that the movie lasts, and try to give it absolutely everything I can.

The audience is the most revered member of the theater. Without an audience, there is no theater. Everything done is ultimately for the enjoyment of the audience. They are our guests, fellow players, and the last spoke in the wheel which can then begin to roll. They make the performance meaningful.

I was doing community theater, and I was always interested in acting, but I was also interested in sports. I was interested in a lot of things. I was a pretty normal guy. I wasn't like a guy who grew up in a dark theater watching movies.

Theres no doubt that some of the greatest films ever made have come from the theater. Its all a matter of finding a way to make the theater experience watchable on film.

It's based not only on what it played like in the theater, but it's also knowing that certain things play differently in a home theater environment. You have different expectations when you're sitting with 700 people than when you're sitting with your friends or family. It's just a different world.

I reeled my head back, and with violent, uncontrollable contortions, I launched a spray of yellow, soupy duckfoot vomit into the air ... I (didn't see) where my regurgitated lunch had ended up after it'd been blasted from my throat. I booked it out of the now-befouled Chang'an Theater as fast as possible. (My guide) found me fifteen minutes later trying to look as casual as it is possible for a six-foot-two curly-haired white guy to look in a Beijing theater.

When I was doing Shakespeare and I had spent a lot of time and effort in trying to become a great Shakespearean actress. That was how I started my career, was in the theater doing Shakespeare. And my ambition was to be a great classical actress. That was what I wanted more than anything. So, I really pursued that in the first four years of my career. And it was an uphill struggle. It really was. Shakespeare's difficult and Shakespeare in a big theater is even more difficult. So, anyway, it was a struggle for me.

Because I come from the theater, I use the images of the theater and of movies a great deal when I write. I see the story in my head. I have to break down the outline of a story first. I have to know where I'm going. Usually I have a good beginning and a good ending, and then I think, "Now I have to find my way through it."

The truth of the matter is, every film is imperfect. It's the nature of the beast. One of the things that people ask me all the time is, what's the difference between theater and film, and one of the biggest differences is, in the theater you always get another go.

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.

I started doing regional theater. My first job was "The Importance of Being Earnest" at Dallas Theater Center.

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 prefer the films that put their audience to sleep in the theater. Some films have made me doze off in the theater, but the same films have made me stay up at night, wake up thinking about them in the morning, and keep on thinking about them for weeks.

At one time musical theater, particularly in the '40s and '50s, was a big source of pop songs. That's how musical theater started, really - it was just a way of linking several pop songs for the stage.

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.

The notion that the staging of the play Harry Potter should be raw magic and street theater rather than high-tech theater, was essential.

When you find theater writing like in the theater on film but it's realistic, it doesn't matter who the character is, you want to do it.

It's a certain kind of human compact that obviously you lose as soon as there is a screen and a camera there, so I think we'll always have theater. I think theater will always be a powerful force because we need that human touch, particularly as we spend more and more time with machines, cell phones, computers we start to lose our humanity.

Being on a film set is like being in tech forever. In theater, when you finally finish rehearsing, you go onstage and you do the lights and the sets and you make the machine of the production work. It takes usually about ten days in the theater, two or three weeks if it's a really big musical. I mean, it's hell on earth. You just sit around forever while they adjust the lights. And every playwright with half a brain runs for the hills when tech starts because it's so boring, and you don't want to talk to the director because the director is running this giant machine.

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.

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

My happiest times in the theater are when I do ensemble pieces. I really got into theater because of that closeness.

I think theater is powerful. The best experiences I had in the theater are more powerful than the best experiences I had in movies.

I've been lucky enough to be part of some great ensembles in theater - I'd been doing theater since college.

I would not change very much about the American theater. I marvel and rejoice in the way the country's regional theaters have formed a network that has become, in essence, our National Theater.

I know that actors and actresses have a great reputation for being very, very selfish, and in some cases, that's very true. But in the theater I find it doesn't help you to be selfish. You sort of have to be selfless in the theater, and the more selfless you are - that doesn't mean don't take care of yourself - but the more you sort of surrender to the work, I find, the better the work is. That's just my experience.

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

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.

It takes a little more time to get into the role, but not very much more. In making a record you don't have the sense of projection over a distance as in an opera house. We have this microphone and this magnifies all details of a performance, all exaggerations. In the theater, you can get away with a very large, very grand phrase. For the microphone, you have to tone it down. It's the same as making a film, your gestures will be seen in close-up, so they cannot be exaggerated as they would be in a theater.

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.

Anyone can do shock value. Develop enough tension and cue the music right, then have something jump out: It's almost impossible not to jump in your seat. But that doesn't leave any effect on you when you leave the movie theater. To me, the best horror is psychological horror. The Exorcist, The Shining, The Omen, things that kind of stick with you long after you've seen them. It's what you don't see. It's letting the audience think a little bit, not spelling it out for them. Giving them credit for using their own imaginations rather than sticking in gags and tricks.

It's just a wonderful experience and it's fun when you make a film and people go to it to emote and in my picture you hear the audible sobbing and then you hear the audible laughter and then you see people leaving the theater with a little bit of spring in their step. It's just great to be part of one that lasts a long time.

Look at the darkest hit musicals - Cabaret, West Side Story, Carousel - they are exuberant experiences. They send you out of the theater filled with music

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

But, yes, I learned everything working in theater. I learned the importance of community - I was constantly going to play readings, stand-up nights, improv. nights.

Don't be late to the theater. The opening scene is a goody.

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.

Radio is truly the theater of the mind. The listener constructs the sets, colors them from his own palette, and sculpts and costumes the characters who perform in them.

I wish to be moved. I cannot feel in life. I must have others do it for me in theater.

I moved to New York to do theater, and I got cast in a play that was funny, and then I was the funny guy. I did a movie that was funny, and then I was the funny guy.

I know that every actor that I know, when Daniel Day-Lewis does a film, and he doesn't work that often, but we run to the theater to see what he's up to, and with such delicious excitement. The same goes for Meryl Streep.

Unless an entire row of people got up in the middle of a performance and left the theater in disgust, I felt as though I hadn't done my job.

The musical is the one area of the theater that can give you the biggest buzz of all.

I did theater at Carnegie, and in Pittsburgh and New York.