Theatre Quotes
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- " [The wonderful thing about theater is that] you get to keep doing it again. You get to keep finding something new. Sometimes I do send myself on a quest, when you feel stuck or it doesn't feel fresh [after multiple performances]. I'll set myself off on a quest to search for something or to focus on something. Or just because my day was different, that shifts my perspective. So I never feel like, "Okay, nailed it." No. Now, I don't tend to think about what I want an audience to get. I tend to think about what the character needs to get. "
- Donna Murphy
Source: Nothing Like a Dame, by Eddie Shapiro (Oxford University Press)
- " It's a funny thing to discover that you can stand there and demand the attention of the audience and give them everything you've got, and share with them the great moments that are there in the role. It took me awhile to really do that."
- Angela Lansbury
Source: Nothing Like a Dame, by Eddie Shapiro (Oxford University Press)
- " I’ve never really given that up or gone beyond that idea of being a translator, of explaining people to each other, of being a conduit of mutual emotional understanding. I’m only being a little grandiose when I say I think that’s why I’ve always been drawn to characters who are difficult to translate to other people, prissy women, disagreeable women, women whose motives are easily misconstrued, women who are hard to love." Developing that capacity for empathy, Streep said, has given her the ability to “feel the exquisite living pleasure of transmitting (a character’s) feelings to an audience. It’s an actor’s singular joy."
- Meryl Streep
Source: princeton.edu/news
- " The play's the thing" refers to a famous line from Shakespeare's Hamlet (Act 2, scene 2), where Hamlet uses a play-within-a-play to expose his uncle's guilt in his father's murder. The phrase also serves as the title for numerous books, podcasts, television episodes, and even a board game, with meanings ranging from a theatrical proverb to the essential role of children's play in development. "
- William Shakespeare
Source: No Sweat Shakespeare
- " Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounc'd it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of ourplayers do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. [Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2]"
- William Shakespeare
Source: shakespeare.mit.edu
- " "All the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players" is the opening line of a monologue from William Shakespeare's play As You Like It, specifically Act II, Scene VII. The quote, also known as "The Seven Ages of Man," compares human life to a theatrical play, with people playing various roles as they pass through different stages of life, from infancy to old age, eventually making their exits from the world."
- William Shakespeare
- " I think one of the things that makes theater special is first of all, it's one of the last places you put your phone away."
- Lin-Manuel Miranda
Source: www.denvercenter.org/news-center/
- " I try to let my decisions be guided not by what I think will succeed or fail, but what I'm going to learn from that process."
- Lin-Manuel Miranda Miranda
- " Movies will make you famous; Television will make you rich; But theatre will make you good."
- Terrence Mann
- " Theatre promotes us to give power to truth, to take risks and to advocate for new and diverse voices. Theatre reminds us that we are not alone. Not only are we sharing space and an experience with the artists who are performing, we are sharing the experience with fellow audience members."
- Acting Studio Chicago
Source: "5 Reasons Why Theatre Is Still Important": www.actingstudiochicago.com
- " There are so many ambiguous expectations of what a “Latino play” must do, and how it must represent its people, none of which match the reality of their lived experiences. But that’s what happens when people deal with “the Other”. They tend to want it to conform to preconceived notions, or to glamorize or exoticize it. I’m just interested in showing Latinos as people with the same capacities to succeed or fail in their lives like anyone else. "
- Octavio Solis
Source: The Rumpus Interview with Octavio Solis. February 1, 2013 [ https://therumpus.net/2013/02/01/the-rumpus-interview-with-octavio-solis/ ]
- " In a backstage interview during “The Taming of the Shrew,” Julia exclaims, “Some people think the only way to do Shakespeare is to do it like the British do it, because the British have the answer to Shakespeare! So I would imitate all the British.” He launches into a plummy version of “Othello,” and continues, “But then afterward I started realizing that I didn’t have to do it like that. I could bring myself to it. I could bring my own culture, my own Puerto Rican background, my own Spanish culture, my own rhythms.” Shakespeare benefitted from what Julia brought to his verse, which the actress Rita Moreno describes as salero. “It just means he was spicy,” she says, in the documentary. “And sexy, and tall!”"
- Raul Julia
Source: New Yorker article by Michael Schulman, September 13, 2019
- " Most plays have four, five vital moments in the play and the rest of the play is just getting to it. It’s just fill. I don’t know why, whether it’s just to create the sense that it’s real or that you have to spend two hours to experience the power (you have to see not just snapshots). But I find it very boring. I go to sleep when I see plays like that, and I go to sleep writing it. I would just actually fall asleep at the typewriter and would not be able to finish a scene written like that. What’s different now is that my work is much more emotional and connected to story. Because of that and the fact that the air around it is clean, it’s very strange. It reminds me a little bit of Edward Hopper’s paintings—where there’s something very real about the situation, it’s very mundane, but the air is always so clean you feel there’s something wrong."
- María Irene Fornés
- " Musicals were never not cool to me."
- Lin-Manuel Miranda
Source: Financial Times, 2022
- " The past isn't done with us. Ever, ever, ever, "
- Lin-Manuel Miranda
Source: NPR's "Fresh Air," June 29, 2020
- " Keep your hands moving. Writing is rewriting. "
- August Wilson
- " I write for myself, and my goal is bringing that world and that experience of Black Americans to life on the stage and giving it a space there. "
- August Wilson
- " All art is political in the sense that it serves someone's politics. "
- August Wilson
Source: The Paris Review (The Art of Theater No. 14)
- " You know what's the loudest noise in the world, man? The loudest noise in the world is silence. "
- Thelonious Monk
Source: The Quotable Musician, from Bach to Tupac, by Sheila E. Anderson (Allworth Press)
- " 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
Source: Interview with the set designer in Stage Directions magazine, August 2019