Quotes on Theater

I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won't contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That's what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.

The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.

Stand-up is the only thing in which you actually write it, act it and direct it simultaneously, so it's actually a great theater exercise.

I always think if it's a good story, the audience can't wait to run out of the theater and go tweet somebody with the gist of a story, in a nutshell, almost, because it was that interesting.

My oldest brother used to take me to the theater. The first play he took me to see was 'Black Comedy,' then he took me to see 'Butley.' We'd see all these British plays. And 'Hello, Dolly,' with Pearl Bailey. I was unconsciously thinking, 'Gee, I would love to be able to do that.'

Who should listen to discussions of theology? Those for whom it is a serious undertaking, not just another subject like any other for entertaining small-talk, after the races, the theater, songs, food, and sex: for there are people who count chatter on theology and clever deployment of arguments as one of their amusements.

Theater used to be a verb; it used to be an act. But nowadays it is just a noun. It is a place.

I always thought I'd be a New York theater actor, riding my bicycle to rehearsal. That was all I ever wanted.

The knights of the theater represented to me not only the pinnacle of the profession but the esteem in which the profession was held. To find myself, to my astonishment, in that company is the grandest thing that has professionally happened to me.

Art, in the widest sense of the word, is the instrument Hellenism has used and would use for that purpose. All the arts, poetry, music, ritual, the visual arts, the theatre, must work singly and together to create the most comprehensive art of all, a humanized society, and its masterpiece, the free man.

The true theater, because it moves and makes use of living instruments, continues to stir up shadows where life has never ceased to grope its way.

A lot of the time I hate the theater. You think, 'I have to climb Mount Everest, again, tonight.' Oh, the theater is a scary place to be.

There is a kind of classlessness in the theater. The rehearsal pianist, the head carpenter, the stage manager, the star of the show-all are family.

To treat a big subject in the intensely summarized fashion demanded by an evening's traffic of the stage when the evening, freely clipped at each end, is reduced to two hours and a half, is a feat of which the difficulty looms large.

A dramatic experience concerned with the mundane may inform but it cannot release; and one concerned essentially with the aesthetic politics of its creators may divert or anger, but it cannot enlighten.

In the theater, while you recognized that you were looking at a house, it was a house in quotation marks. On screen, the quotation marks tend to be blotted out by the camera.

Washington has become our Versailles. We are ruled, entertained, and informed by courtiers -- and the media has evolved into a class of courtiers. The Democrats, like the Republicans, are mostly courtiers. Our pundits and experts, at least those with prominent public platforms, are courtiers. We are captivated by the hollow stagecraft of political theater as we are ruthlessly stripped of power. It is smoke and mirrors, tricks and con games, and the purpose behind it is deception.

You come in off the street, through the doors of the theater. You sit down. The lights go down and the curtain goes up. And you're in another world

Now why should the cinema follow the forms of theater and painting rather than the methodology of language, which allows wholly new concepts of ideas to arise from the combination of two concrete denotations of two concrete objects?

When I was doing ensemble theater and comedy work, I felt I had some talents. But when I started doing my shows in Berkeley and found that I could be funny on my own, I was shocked.

I was afraid to watch 'Blade Runner' in the theater because I was afraid the movie would be better than what I myself had been able to imagine. In a way, I was right to be afraid, because even the first few minutes were better.