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.

I think any filmmaker will tell you when they wandered from theater to theater to watch their prints, it was disheartening to see the poor levels of light and the disrespect for films that existed in certain theater chains. It was always inconsistent.

Theater of Cruelty means a theater difficult and cruel for myself first of all. And, on the level of performance, it is not the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other’s bodies, carving up our personal anatomies, or, like Assyrian emperors, sending parcels of human ears, noses, or neatly detached nostrils through the mail, but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has been created to teach us that first of all.

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

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 was 22 and stopped writing plays, and I didn't start again until I was 25. I was writing badly. In college, I attempted to write these more conventional plays, but the theater I loved was downtown experimental theater. I didn't feel like I could do that either. It didn't occur to me to do my own thing.

To me, theater is a spiritual experience. Probably the reason I do theater is it, I guess, comes the closest to feeling like God, or to feeling a spiritual experience that people can have together.

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.

I've never done theater professionally. But I went to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, so I did some theater there.

...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.

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.

Well, enforcement theater is OK if it's reality theater. In other words, obviously, you want to make it clear, you want to make people see that the law is being enforced.

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.

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.

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.

There's theater in life, obviously, and there's life in theater.

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 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.

Neither should the theater in our country be regarded as a luxury. It is a necessity because in order to make democracy work the people must increasingly participate; they can't participate unless they understand; and the theater is one of the great mediums of understanding.

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 love theater. I grew up doing theater.

The role that theater has placed in enhancing consciousness and moving systems ahead. I think of what South African theater meant for the apartheid movement, for example. I think of what music has meant for so many social movements across time.

So I've done my fair share of theater. I have also been very fortunate in that I've been able to come to New York two or three times a year just to see as many shows as possible. I think the live theater culture here is incredible.

Music is for theater like theater is for scripts. It's total: it's cyclical.

In terms of trying to improve as an actor, for me it's always important to return to the stage. After doing a piece of theater for a prolonged period, I can think I must have surely improved in some way as an actor - you must be fitter than you were prior to doing it. For me, theater is very, very important in keeping things fresh and dangerous.

I always think that the difference between film and theater is like the difference between masturbation and making love. Because, in film, you just have to get one moment right; you're practically by yourself. And in theater, you actually have to have a relationship with the audience.

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.

Tennis is more than just a sport. It's an art, like the ballet. Or like a performance in the theater.

In the summer of 2009, I was at the Shakespeare lab at the public theater in New York.

Unlike a lot of British directors, I hadn't done any theater. But, I had a great mentor who said, "What you're looking for is exactly the same thing you've done in your documentaries, which is moments of emotional truth.

Immediate gratification of a live audience makes me come alive. I miss performing in theater. I'll make my return to the stage eventually.

Oh, I was completely hooked on movies and plays and theater from the time I was a day old; I was very, very early on in love with movies and I loved plays.

I have done a lot of theater.

I want an open dialogue. I want husbands and wives and people in relationships to walk out of the theater thinking, "Could this happen to me? I know I'm being tempted."

I didn't do improv in college, I never performed, I didn't do theater either. I was in student government, I was a history major.

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

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.

When that word came down that the company had decided that we were going to go theatrical, we hooped and hollered and wahooed and all of that stuff, but the good thing is we didn't have to change anything. It's not like all of a sudden we had to reset, like "Oh my gosh, we're going to theater. We've got to make this better. We've got to make this bigger. We've got to add..." It was all done.

By the time I was twelve, I had started my own theater company and was doing plays in the backyard and the front yard and all over the neighborhood, so, you know, I was definitely a lifer even back when I was 10.

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.

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 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.

In the theater, which is a sort of jungle, one does have to be a little bit careful. One mustn't be so rigid or egotistical to think that every comma is sacrosanct. But at the same time there is the danger of losing control and finding that somebody else has opened a play and not you.

I see too many men delay their exits with a sickly, slow reluctance to leave the stage. It's bad theater as well as bad living.

I'm very resistant to most forms of theater.

Every movement of the theater by a skilful poet is communicated, as it were, by magic, to the spectators; who weep, tremble, resent, rejoice, and are inflamed with all the variety of passions which actuate the several personages of the drama.

The theater audience is the ultimate teacher, instructing the actor on the degree to which he has executed both the author's and the director's intent.