Theatre Quotes
For use in newsletters, season or fundraising brochures or emails, presentations--you name it.
| Category | Quote | First |
Last |
Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Set Design |
My process is that I will read the play a couple of times and then not do anything until I've spoken with the director, because, of course, there are 500 different ways a play can look--and still honor every word that's in those stage directions. I don't want to think about how it works until I know what the director is interested in, and if the playwright is around, what they're thinking about as they've written it. Then I go away and do my research. |
Rachel | Hauck | Interview with the set designer in Stage Directions magazine, August 2019 |
| Playwriting |
Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might have -- by disrupting that order -- a way of surprising. |
Vaclav | Havel | |
| Acting |
The worst constructed play is a Bach fugue when compared to life. |
Helen | Hayes | |
| Acting |
Actors cannot choose the manner in which they are born. Consequently, it is the one gesture in their lives completely devoid of self-consciousness. |
Helen | Hayes | |
| Acting |
Actors work and slave and it is the color of your hair that can determine your fate in the end. |
Helen | Hayes | |
| Set Design |
A ground plan is important in terms of its rigor. If your plan is soggy and weak, your production will be soggy and weak. |
David | Hays | http://www.emerson.edu/emersontoday/index.cfm?action=3&articleID=678&editionID=45 |
| Acting |
Actors are the only honest hypocrites. |
William | Hazlitt | |
| Acting, Costumes |
The subjective actress thinks of clothes only as they apply to her; the objective actress thinks of them only as they affect others, as a tool for the job. |
Edith | Head | |
| Acting |
A cat actually thinks visibly. If you watch him jump on a shelf, the wish to jump and the action of jumping are one and the same thing... It's in exactly the same way that all Brook's exercises try to train the actor. The actor is trained to become so organically related within himself, he thinks completely with his body. He becomes one sensitive, responding whole... The whole of him is one. |
John | Heilpern | |
| Playwriting |
Failure in the theatre is more dramatic and uglier than in any other form of writing. It costs so much, you feel so guilty. |
Lillian | Hellman | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
