Quotes on Theater

I played in front of every conceivable audience you could face: an all-black audience, all-white, firemen's fairs, policemen's balls, in front of supermarkets, bar mitzvahs, weddings, drive-in theaters. I'd seen it all before I ever walked into a recording studio.

I just like the continue doing what I've been doing. A melange of funny, straight drama, television, movies, a little theater here and there wouldn't hurt. So if I can keep doing that, I'll be a very happy person.

I don't feel I've arrived home until I get on the beach. All my life, the theater of the sea has been a very strong thing.

Usually in theater, the visual repeats the verbal. The visual dwindles into decoration. But I think with my eyes. For me, the visual is not an afterthought, not an illustration of the text. If it says the same thing as the words, why look? The visual must be so compelling that a deaf man would sit though the performance fascinated.

And that's what people want to see when they go to the theater. I believe at the end of the day, they want to see themselves - parts of their lives they can recognize. And I feel if I can achieve that, it's pretty spectacular.

The theater requires an essential gullibility that you can't get through life without having. If all you can feel is skepticism-well , you meet people like this. Run away from them. They're not good people.

I look back on those early days in the theater like the beginning of a love affair, when you're totally in love with the work, and that's all there is.

Being in ballet class, being on the stage, being surrounded by my peers at American Ballet Theater every day, keeps me so humble and grounded. Being in ballet class, I feel, is like this meditation for me every morning.

I adore the theater and I am a painter. I think the two are made for a marriage of love. I will give all my soul to prove this once more.

Never stand still. Only stand still enough to learn, and once you stop learning in that stance, move off. Always keep yourself engaged, in theater, in whatever job you can get. If you can't get an acting job, then go backstage. Or take tickets. But be around actors because that is where you will primarily learn.

Popular culture is the new Babylon, into which so much art and intellect now flow. It is our imperial sex theater, supreme temple of the western eye. We live in the age of idols. The pagan past, never dead, flames again in our mystic hierarchies of stardom.

When I was in high school I got involved in the fringe theater scene in Chicago, and I met some openly gay people. I could see that it got better, that they were happy and loved and supported. I saw with my own eyes that it got better.

To me, what is important in the theater is that we don't want to make a conclusion. We don't want to make a statement, don't want to say what something is. We want to ask, 'What is it?'

You don't enter the theater and pay your money to be afraid. You enter the theater and pay your money to have the fears that are already in you when you go into a theater dealt with and put into a narrative.

There were not a lot of women in the theater department - it was really run by men, and so the message was that women can be onstage, but women can't really be backstage.

I went into performing for the community. Being backstage with your company of fellows is the best part of working in live theater. That energy, that combined focus, the synergy - it's addictive.

I want to do work that means something to me so that when I go to work at the theater eight times a week, I want to be there.

I always say it takes three weeks to know a character and three months to own it. And I think that's probably true of every theater artist. If you really want to see a performance of the show, wait three months.

If you want to be an actor and you love acting, you can do it whether you're doing something else or not. You can be connected with community theater or make your own little movies. But if you want to be a movie star, you've got a tough road ahead of you.

I think theater ought to be theatrical ... you know, shuffling the pack in different ways so that it's -- there's always some kind of ambush involved in the experience. You're being ambushed by an unexpected word, or by an elephant falling out of the cupboard, whatever it is.

Once, when we were playing at the Apollo Theater, Holiday was working a block away at the Harlem Opera House. Some of us went over between shows to catch her, and afterwards we went backstage. I did something then, and I still don't know if it was the right thing to do—I asked her for her autograph.