Theatre Quotes

If no single reason can fully account for the lack of great work on Broadway these days, there is a factor in the discussion that is rarely mentioned but which has a bearing on what gets produced: the audience. . . It's not audience intelligence that has waned; it's audience passion -- the pro forma Broadway standing ovation now springs from duty not desire. . . If that passion exists more in the audience for The Lord of the Rings than for contemporary Broadway musicals, well, at least it is alive somewhere.

People often ask me how long it takes me to write a play, and I tell them 'all of my life.'

An actor is at his best a kind of unfrocked priest who, for an hour or two, can call on heaven and hell to mesmerize a group of innocents

There are two kinds of theatre, good and bad. Much as I should like to see theatre in America, I would rather have no theatre than bad theatre. What we must strive for is perfection and come as close to it as is humanly possible

There's a certain secret every actor must have in his work. If you reveal it, you're letting the audience in on the wrinkles and convolutions of your brain. All I want them to do is to see the effect.

As a writer you're holding a dog. You let the dog run about. But you finally can pull him back. Finally, I'm in control. But the great excitement is to see what happens if you let the whole thing go. And the dog or the character really runs about, bites everyone in sight, jumps up trees, falls into lakes, gets wet, and you let that happen. That's the excitement of writing plays--to allow the thing to be free but still hold the final leash.

A nation that does not support and encourage its theater is -- if not dead -- dying; just as a theater that does not capture with laughter and tears the social and historical pulse, the drama of its people, the genuine color of the spiritual and natural landscape, has no right to call itself theater; but only a place for amusement.

Acting is a very limited form of expression and those who take it seriously are very limited people. I take it seriously.

Directing takes such a big lump out of your life.

Acting is mostly about listening. If you just focus in on what the other person is saying, acting takes care of itself to quite a large extent.

Wherever it came from, the musical came with its hair mussed and with an innocent, indolent, irreverent look on its bright, bland face.

The sheer complexity of writing a play always had dazzled me. In an effort to understand it, I became a critic.

Writing a play, you start with less, so more is demanded of you. It's as if you have to not only write a symphony, but invent the instruments as well.

I open with a clock striking, to beget an awful attention in the audience -- it also marks the time, which is four o clock in the morning, and saves a description of the rising sun, and a great deal about gilding the eastern hemisphere.

Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.

The theatre is a spiritual and social X-ray of its time.

I started off as a theatre designer, and by some extraordinary circumstance I saw something in Stratford-upon-Avon, and realized that that's the kind of design I want, but also that that's the kind of designer I'll never be.

Once in awhile, there's stuff that makes me say, That's what theatre's about. It has to be a human event on the stage, and that doesn't happen very often.

Eugene Lee is a set designer who's famously said that he hates scenery. The reason it's such a joy to work with him is he's never designing the scenery, he's designing the room in which theater is going to take place. It makes for a much more vibrant conversation about what we're going to work on together. [Oskar Eustis , artistic director of the Public Theater, Boston]