Theatre Quotes

If you cried a little less, the audience would cry more.

Have a very good reason for everything you do.

Know your lines and don't bump into the furniture.

Use your weaknesses; aspire to the strength.

Act in your pauses.

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.

What acting means is that you've got to get out of your own skin.

Lead the audience by the nose to the thought.

To be a character who feels a deep emotion, one must go into the memory's vault and mix in a sad memory from one's own life.

The most important thing in acting is honesty. If you can fake that, you've got it made.

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.

Don't use your conscious past, use your creative imagination to create a past that belongs to your character. I don't want you to be stuck with your own life. It's too little.

In community theatres, "doers" seem to do the following: act, direct, choreograph, accompany, design, build, find, sew, sell, or usher. "Managers" plan, organize, staff, supervise and evaluate. Doers, like directors and crew chiefs, also "manage," and managers like stage managers also sometimes "do"--find props, paint sets, or hang lights. Leaders can also be managers and/or doers, but in their leadership capacity their activities include these: dreaming, pushing, causing to grow, problem-solving and inspiring. Their qualities of intelligence, imagination, commitment, perseverance, and passion are the very qualities that invite the rest of us to say "Yes!"

The thing that makes a creative person is to be creative and that is all there is to it.

The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life.

Coughing in the theater is not a respiratory ailment. It is a criticism.

Before a character even speaks, we 'read' their appearance through their costume.

Everything placed in the performance space, with the characters, creates a context for their story.
What is the shape of the space?
How do the shapes and colours within the space relate to the characters?
How do they 'frame' them?
What comments do the frames make about the characters and their worlds?

Acting isn't really a creative profession. It's an interpretive one.