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Theatre Quotes

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Displaying 341 - 360 of 425
  • " Lighting is not about function. It's much more about the mood and the emotion that the playwright and the director are trying to create. Our job is to support their poetic direction."

    - Jules Fisher

    Source: It Happened On Broadway


  • " I want to make the audience laugh and cry within ten seconds, to show just how close those emotions are."

    - Neil Simon

    Source: It Happened On Broadway


  • " Casting is instrumental in helping you understand the play. If you cast it right, as soon as the actor steps on the stage, you get certain impressions that help you understand what the play is about."

    - Howard Kissel

    Source: It Happened On Broadway


  • " Onstage, you just have to tell the absolute truth about the character you are playing. You hope you communicate it, and you hope it comes back like a tennis ball. If you're listening to the sound of your own voice, nobody else is. The audience knows, and they freeze on you."

    - Carol Channing

    Source: It Happened On Broadway


  • " Acting is not about dressing up. Acting is about stripping bare. The whole essence of learning lines is to forget them so you can make them sound like you thought of them that instant."

    - Glenda Jackson


  • " All action in theatre must have inner justification, be logical, coherent, and real."

    - Constantin Stanislavski


  • " Acting, in general, is something most people think they're incapable of, but they do it from morning to night. The subtlest acting I've ever seen is by ordinary people trying to show they feel something they don't, or trying to hide something. It's something everyone learns at an early age."

    - Marlon Brando

    Source: Newsweek, 13 March 1972


  • " Drama - what literature does at night."

    - George Jean Nathan


  • " Actors ought to be larger than life. You come across quite enough ordinary, nondescript people in daily life and I don't see why you should be subjected to them on the stage too."

    - Donald Sinden


  • " I see the playwright as a lay preacher peddling the ideas of his time in popular form."

    - August Strindberg


  • " Most playwrights go wrong on the fifth word. When you start a play and you type 'Act one, scene one,' your writing is every bit as good as Arthur Miller or Eugene O'Neill or anyone. It's that fifth word where amateurs start to go wrong."

    - Meredith Willson


  • " The work of rehearsal is looking for meaning and then making it meaningful."

    - Peter Brook


  • " The purpose of theatre is... making an event in which a group of fragments are suddenly brought together... in a community which, by the natural laws that make every community, gradually breaks up... At certain moments this fragmented world comes together and for a certain time it can rediscover the marvel of organic life. The marvel of being one."

    - Peter Brook


  • " A cat actually thinks visibly. If you watch him jump on a shelf, the wish to jump and the action of jumping are one and the same thing... It's in exactly the same way that all Brook's exercises try to train the actor. The actor is trained to become so organically related within himself, he thinks completely with his body. He becomes one sensitive, responding whole... The whole of him is one."

    - John Heilpern


  • " Preparing a character is the opposite of building--it is a demolishing, removing brick by brick everything in the actor's muscles, ideas and inhibitions that stands between him and the part, until one day, with a great rush of air, the character invades his every pore."

    - Peter Brook


  • " To go into acting is like asking for admission to an insane asylum. Anyone may apply, but only the certifiably insane are admitted."

    - Michael Shurtleff

    Source: Audition


  • " The life of the arts, far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of a nation, is close to the center of a nation's purpose -- and is a test of the quality of a nation's civilization."

    - John F Kennedy


  • " Perhaps, therefore, ideal stage managers not only need to be calm and meticulous professionals who know their craft, but masochists who feel pride in rising above impossible odds."

    - Peter Hall


  • " The basic essential of a great actor is that he loves himself in acting."

    - Charles Chaplin


  • " First of all, I choose the great roles, and if none of these come, I choose the mediocre ones, and if they don't come, I choose the ones that pay the rent."

    - Michael Caine