Theater Quotes

The stock actor is a stage calamity

I do not want actors and actresses to understand my plays. That is not necessary. If they will only pronounce the correct sounds I can guarantee the results.

Just as the historian can teach no real history until he has cured his readers of the romantic delusion that the greatness of a queen consists in her being a pretty woman and having her head cut off, so the playwright of the first order can do nothing with his audience until he has cured them of looking at the stage through the keyhole, and sniffing round the theatre as prurient people sniff round the divorce court.

I didn't have a life until I went up onstage.

The function of the actor is to make the audience imagine for the moment that real things are happening to real people.

When ''night, Mother' opened, I did not know how long it would be before I would have another show on Broadway.

A drama critic is a man who leaves no turn unstoned.

He that plays the king shall be welcome- his Majesty shallhave tribute of me; the adventurous knight shall use his foil andtarget; the lover shall not sigh gratis; the humorous man shallend his part in peace; the clown shall make those laugh whoselungs are tickle o' th' sere; and the lady shall say her mindfreely, or the blank verse shall halt fort.

It was never my dream to be famous. I didn't start acting to be a movie star. I started in the theater and my desire was to get better at my craft. It's still my desire. I don't consider myself a movie star, nor do I really have the desire to be one. I'm just an entertainer. An actor who works hard at his craft. Whatever labels people give me, that's not really me or part of my process.

Let us have no ranting tragedies. Too many charactersNot a tolerable woman's part in the play.

Unless comedy touches me as well as amuses me, it leaves me with a sense of having wasted my evening. I go to the theatre to be moved to laughter, not to be tickled or bustled into it.

In order to fully realize how bad a popular play can be, it is necessary to see it twice.

The play's the thing.

To a professional critic (I have been one myself) theatre-going is the curse of Adam. The play is the evil he is paid to endure in the sweat of his brow; and the sooner it is over, the better.

Fine art is the subtlest, the most seductive, the most effective instrument of moral propaganda in the world, excepting only the example of personal conduct; and I waive even this exception in favor of the art of the stage, because it works by exhibiting examples of personal conduct made intelligible and moving to crowds of unobservant unreflecting people to whom real life means nothing.

The theater is a great equalizer: it is the only place where the poor can look down on the rich.

My curse on playsThat have to be set up in fifty ways,On the day's war with every knave and dolt,Theater business, management of men.

That's what I tell young actors. "You don't have to compromise. Go do some theater and wait for an appropriate role."

Viola [Davis] is one of the great actors of her generation. She has one of these moments in the theater that I don't even know how to describe.

The popular definition of tragedy is heavy drama in which everyone is killed in the last act, comedy being light drama in which everyone is married in the last act.

The theater was my mother and my father.

If it ain't on a page, it ain't on a stage.

What we did [shooting "Fences"] was we got young students from Carnegie Mellon, the acting and theater students, and we had them as our understudies. I told them, "You have to be off book and be ready. If Viola [Davis] has to leave you have to jump in."

The only link between Literature and the Drama left to us in England at the present moment is the bill of the play.

Good theater is not what is expected, but what surprises.

The only way to see the value of a play is to see it acted.

My preference is live performance, because you get the feedback. There's an energy. It's live theater. That's why I think actors like that.

I didn't like the play, but then I saw it under adverse conditions - the curtain was up.

Hamlet has been played by 5,000 actors, no wonder he is crazy.