Theatre Quotes
For use in newsletters, season or fundraising brochures or emails, presentations--you name it.
| Category | Quote |
First |
Last | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Playwriting |
Most plays have four, five vital moments in the play and the rest of the play is just getting to it. It’s just fill. I don’t know why, whether it’s just to create the sense that it’s real or that you have to spend two hours to experience the power (you have to see not just snapshots). But I find it very boring. I go to sleep when I see plays like that, and I go to sleep writing it. I would just actually fall asleep at the typewriter and would not be able to finish a scene written like that. What’s different now is that my work is much more emotional and connected to story. Because of that and the fact that the air around it is clean, it’s very strange. It reminds me a little bit of Edward Hopper’s paintings—where there’s something very real about the situation, it’s very mundane, but the air is always so clean you feel there’s something wrong. |
María Irene | Fornés | |
| Acting, Backstage, Directing |
An actor without techies is a naked person standing in the dark trying to emote. A techie without actors is a person with marketable skills. |
Mark | Leslie | http://www.denagy.com/techiejokes/tjokes.html |
| Acting |
Nobody "becomes" a character. You can't act unless you are who you are. |
Marlon | Brando | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
| Acting |
Acting, in general, is something most people think they're incapable of, but they do it from morning to night. The subtlest acting I've ever seen is by ordinary people trying to show they feel something they don't, or trying to hide something. It's something everyone learns at an early age. |
Marlon | Brando | Newsweek, 13 March 1972 |
| Acting |
Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse. It's a bum's life. The principal benefit acting has afforded me is the money to pay for my psychoanalysis. |
Marlon | Brando | |
| General, Playwriting |
Theater is so critical because it has always been able to release people from their isolation... The theater is a communal event, church. The playwright constructs a mass to be performed for a lot of people. She writes a prayer, which is just the longings of one heart. |
Marsha | Norman | |
| Acting, Directing, General |
Theater is a verb before it is a noun, an act before it is a place. |
Martha | Graham | Merce Cunningham: The Modernizing of Modern Dance, by Roger Copeland (Routledge Books) |
| Playwriting |
A good play is a play which when acted upon the boards make an audience interested and pleased. A play that fails in this is a bad play. |
Maurice | Baring | http://theatre.usc.edu/whatistheatre |
| Playwriting |
Most playwrights go wrong on the fifth word. When you start a play and you type 'Act one, scene one,' your writing is every bit as good as Arthur Miller or Eugene O'Neill or anyone. It's that fifth word where amateurs start to go wrong. |
Meredith | Willson | |
| Acting |
I'm a skilled professional actor. Whether or not I've any talent is beside the point. |
Michael | Caine | Film Yearbook, 1985 |
