Theatre Quotes
For use in newsletters, season or fundraising brochures or emails, presentations--you name it.
Category | Quote | First | Last | Source |
---|---|---|---|---|
Playwriting |
The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost. |
Arthur | Miller | http://www.satheatre.com/quotes.htm |
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 | |
General |
The theater has to impose itself on the public, and not the public on the theater... The word "Art" should be written everywhere, in the auditorium and in the dressing rooms, before the word "Business" gets written there. |
Federico Garcia | Lorca | |
General |
The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything -- gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness -- rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations. To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre. |
Antonin | Artaud | |
Acting |
The theatre has built a whole art round the actor, based on the man and his double - the actor and his character. |
Jean-Louis | Barrault | http://www.satheatre.com/quotes.htm |
General, Playwriting |
The theatre is a gross art, built in sweeps and over-emphasis. Compromise is its second name. |
Enid | Bagnold | |
General |
The theatre is a spiritual and social X-ray of its time. |
Stella | Adler | http://www.brainyquote.com |
General |
The theatre is supremely fitted to say: "Behold! These things are." Yet most dramatists employ it to say: "This moral truth can be learned from beholding this action." |
Thornton | Wilder | |
General, Playwriting |
The theatre is the best way of showing the gap between what is said and what is seen to be done, and that is why, ragged and gap-toothed as it is, it has still a far healthier potential than some poorer, abandoned arts. |
David | Hare | |
General |
The theatre should be treated with respect. The theatre is a wonderful place, a house of strange enchantment, a temple of illusion. What it most emphatically is not and never will be is a scruffy, ill-lit, fumed-oak drill hall serving as a temporary soap box for political propaganda. |
Noel | Coward | www.musicals101.com/noelquot.htm |
General |
The theatre was created to tell people the truth about life and the social situation. |
Stella | Adler | http://www.brainyquote.com |
General |
The theatre, like the fresco, is art fitted to its place. And therefore it is above all else the human art, the living art. |
Roman | Rolland | http://www.wisdomportal.com/Quotes |
Acting, General, Playwriting |
The thing that makes a creative person is to be creative and that is all there is to it. |
Edward | Albee | wisdomquotes.com/ |
General |
The truth is that the spectators are always in their senses, and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players. |
Samuel | Johnson | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
Directing |
The truth is that there is no one accepted method for directing, any more than there is for any other art. How a director fares is greatly dependent on who that person is, his collaborators, and the project at hand. To complicate matters, the relationship between product and process isnt't always a direct and causal one. Some directors work themselves to the bone, while others do very little. Paradoxically, they achieve successes and failures in both categories. But it would be naive not to believe that most successful productions occur because of the intensive efforts of a skilled director. |
Michael | Bloom | Thinking Like a Director: A Practical Handbook |
Acting |
The truth of ourselves is the root of our acting. |
Sanford | Meisner | http://www.aldersonstudio.com/quotes/index.html |
Acting, Directing |
The two happiest days in a theatre person's life: The day you start on a new show and the day the thing closes. |
Unknown | ||
Acting, Directing |
The virtue of dress rehearsals is that they are a free show for a select group of artists and friends of the author, and where for one unique evening the audience is almost expurgated of idiots. |
Alfred | Jarry | http://izquotes.com/ |
Acting, Directing |
The whole point about laughter is it's like mercury: you can't catch it, you can't catch what motivates it - that's why it's funny. |
Mike | Nichols | |
General |
The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place. It is the place people come to see the truth about life and the social situation. |
Stella | Adler | http://www.brainyquote.com |
Directing |
The work of rehearsal is looking for meaning and then making it meaningful. |
Peter | Brook | |
General |
The world is a complicated place, and there's a lot of division between people. The performing arts tend to unify people in a way nothing else does. |
David | Rubenstein | |
General |
The world's a theater, the earth a stage, |
Thomas | Heywood | http://theatre.usc.edu/whatistheatre |
Acting |
The worst constructed play is a Bach fugue when compared to life. |
Helen | Hayes | |
General |
Theater is life, film is art, television is furniture. |
Unknown | ||
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 | |
General |
Theater is, of course, a reflection of life. Maybe we have to improve life before we can hope to improve theater. |
William | Inge | Saturday Review 22 Feb 64 |
General |
Theatergoing is a communal act, movie going a solitary one. |
Robert | Brustein | http://izquotes.com/ |
Lighting |
Theatre is interesting because it's a very collaborative process. Typically I'm working with a director, a set designer, a costume designer and a sound designer too. That means that there are a number of perspectives that are brought into any particular script. Typically the director has the final say in where we go conceptually with a piece but we all have an opportunity to influence that direction and typically that direction is based on the script. As such, my studies in english and philosophy have enriched my ability to take a look at a text and react to it in my own way so that I can bring to the table what I consider to be an informed perspective. Then we negotiate the project's process and it's always quite enriching. Projects basically come out of a bond of trust that you have created. As I have progressed throughout my career I have gravitated to people who I feel a common bond with; who I seem to be able to communicate with. We establish a trust and then we go about our project. Very often I will work with someone for three or four years and we will have a particularly creative time and then, for whatever reasons, we will go our separate ways and new bonds will be established. It's an extremely communal approach to the arts. [Lighting designer Jock Munro] |
Jock | Munro | http://www.artsalive.ca |
General |
Theatre is like a virus: once you get it you can't get rid of it. |
Robin | Boisseau | http://www.hamptonu.edu/academics/schools/libarts/fparts/facultyandstaff.htm |
General |
THEATRE LOGIC A drop shouldn't and a Tripping is O.K. A Strike is work |
Unknown | www.angelfire.com/dc/musicthea/Quotes.html | |
Set Design |
Theatrical design is different from many other art forms in that it is a collaborative art. No one theatre artist works independently to create a performance. |
Kaoime | Malloy | The Art of Theatrical Design |
Acting |
There are no small parts, there are only small actors. |
Konstantin | Stanislavksy | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
General |
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 |
Margot | Jones | http://www.curtainup.com/quotepro.html |
Acting, Backstage, Directing, General |
There is a kind of classlessness in the theater. The rehearsal pianist, the head carpenter, the stage manager, the star of the show--all are family. |
John | Kander | It Happened On Broadway |
General, Musical Theatre |
There is a traditional trick that theatre people have played as long as I can remember. A veteran member of a company will order a gullible newcomer to find the key to the curtain. Naturally, the joke is there is no such thing. I have been in the theatre over fifty years, and I don't think anyone would consider me naive, but all my life I've been searching for that key. And I'm still looking. . . . |
Richard | Rodgers | Musical Stages |
Backstage |
There is no definitive list of the duties of a stage manager that is applicable to all theaters and staging environments. Regardless of specific duties, however, the stage manager is the individual who accepts responsibility for the smooth running of rehearsals and performances, on stage and backstage. |
Lawrence | Stern | Stage Management |
General |
There is no greater gift that a person can be given than to be put in touch with his creativity. [Theatre] transformed my life. [Director Declan Donnellan on discovering theatre as a lonely 16 year old.] |
Declan | Donnellan | The Guardian |
Set Design |
There is no more reason for a room on a stage to be a reproduction of an actual room than for an actor who plays the part of Napoleon to be Napoleon, or for an actor who plays Death in the old morality play to be dead. |
Robert | Edmond Jones | The Audience Book of Theatre Quotations, by Louis Phillips |
Acting |
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. |
Frank | Langella | http://www.curtainup.com/quotepro.html |