Theatre Quotes
For use in newsletters, season or fundraising brochures or emails, presentations--you name it.
| Category |
Quote |
First | Last | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lighting, Set Design |
When it's good design, you alone will know. When it's bad design - everyone will tell you! |
Unknown | ||
| Acting |
When you go into the professional world, at a stock theater somewhere, backstage you will meet an older actor--someone who has been around awhile. He will tell you tales and anecdotes about life in the theater. He will speak to you about your performance and the performances of others, and he will generalize to you, based on his experience and his intuitions, about the laws of the stage. Ignore this man. |
Sanford | Meisner | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
| Acting |
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. |
George Bernard | Shaw | Friendly Advice by Jon Winokur |
| Acting |
When you're a young man, Macbeth is a character part. When you're older, it's a straight part. |
Laurence | Olivier | Theatre Arts May 58 |
| Acting, Shakespeare |
When you're a young man, Macbeth is a character part. When you're older, it's a straight part. |
Olivier | Laurence | Laurence Olivier |
| Acting |
When you're doing a play and you're afraid of a scene, that's the scene you should embrace, because that's the scene that will tell you something about the play. |
Raul | Esparza | NY Times, 11/26/06 |
| Musical Theatre |
Wherever it came from, the musical came with its hair mussed and with an innocent, indolent, irreverent look on its bright, bland face. |
Walter | Kerr | http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/w/walter_kerr.html |
| Playwriting |
White male playwrights' works continue to dominate production slates. Sometimes it seems easier for them to have the texts of their driver's licenses produced than for the female or non-white playwright to have her best play produced. The reality is, they are more often given that all-important opportunity to fail than the women's play or ethnic play. |
Velina Hasu | Houston | http://www.pubinfo.vcu.edu/artweb/playwriting/quotes.html |
| Playwriting |
Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory. |
Tennessee | Williams | |
| Costumes |
Why don't I just give you some money, then you can buy whatever you want to wear on stage. You obviously want a shopper, and I am merely a designer. [said to an uncooperative actress during a costume fitting] |
Nan | Cibula-Jenkins | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
