Quotes on Theatre

As in a theatre, the eyes of men, after a well-graced actor leaves the stage, are idly bent on him that enters next.

I hate the word 'production'...it's a ceremony, it's a ritual...you should go out of the theatre stronger and more human than when you went in.

I see the playwright as a lay preacher peddling the ideas of his time in popular form.

As a writer you're holding a dog. You let the dog run about. But you finally can pull him back. Finally, I'm in control. But the great excitement is to see what happens if you let the whole thing go. And the dog or the character really runs about, bites everyone in sight, jumps up trees, falls into lakes, gets wet, and you let that happen. That's the excitement of writing plays-to allow the thing to be free but still hold the final leash.

It's hard enough for me to write what I want to write without me trying to write what you say they want me to write which I don't want to write.

Don't write stage directions. If it is not apparent what the character is trying to accomplish by saying the line, tell us how the character said it or whether or not she moved to the couch isn't going to aid the case.

I started writing for the theatre because I hated it.

The critics suppose that it is easy to write a play. They aren't aware that writing a good play is difficult and writing a bad one is twice as hard.

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.

The truth is that the spectators are always in their senses, and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players.

People have pointed out evidences of personal feeling in my notices as if they were accusing me of a misdemeanor, not knowing that criticism written without personal feeling is not worth reading. It is the capacity for making good or bad art a personal matter that makes a man a critic.

All action in theatre must have inner justification, be logical, coherent, and real.

The most important thing you can teach actors is to understand plays.

Play well, or play badly, but play truly.

When you want to put something into your part that is not in the play, you must ask the author-or some other author-to lead up to the interpolation for you. Never forget that the effect of a line may depend not on its delivery, but on something said earlier in the play, either by somebody else or by yourself, and that if you change it, it may be necessary to change the whole first act as well.

A fool cannot be an actor, though an actor may act a fool's part.

The Actor should make you forget the existence of author and director, and even forget the actor.

Preparing a character is the opposite of building-it is a demolishing, removing brick by brick everything in the actor's muscles, ideas and inhibitions that stands between him and the part, until one day, with a great rush of air, the character invades his every pore.

Family is the theatre of the spiritual drama, the place where things happen, especially the things that matter.

I like a good story well told. That is the reason I am sometimes forced to tell them myself.

We do not go to the theatre like our ancestors, to escape from the pressure of reality, so much as to confirm our experience of it.