Best 414 quotes in «theater quotes» category

The text is your greatest enemy.

There is no limit to what a person can do that has been inspired by the arts!

The rest of us do “high school theater.” Lou does “theater.

The things that make you strange are the things that make you powerful

[The ruling class] sees people in the working class as being almost animals. It sees itself as being synonymous with civilization and its cultivation as coming from its natural abilities and not from its wealth and privileged opportunities. It doesn't see that the way in which it monopolizes these things distorts the culture it derives from them and that this makes its culture irrational and an enemy of civilization.

the theater is one of the few places left in the bright and noisy world where we sit in the quiet dark together, to be awake.

The theatre is a tragic place, full of endings and partings and heartbreak. You dedicate yourself passionately to something, to a project, to people, to a family, you think of nothing else for weeks and months, then suddenly it's over, it's perpetual destruction, perpetual divorce, perpetual adieu. It's like éternel retour, it's a koan. It's like falling in love and being smashed over and over again.’ 'You do, then, fall in love.’ 'Only with fictions, I love players, but actors are so ephemeral. And then there’s waiting for the perfect part, and being offered it the day after you've committed yourself to something utterly rotten. The remorse, and the envy and the jealousy. An old actor told me if I wanted to stay in the trade I had better kill off envy and jealousy at the start.

Two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. We've never quite made peace with that in the theater---set designer Robin Wagner

This was awkward to infinity. Alex living here would change my entire routine. I was sharing a bathroom with my boyfriend. How scary was that? I had tampons and pads and everything in there. He was going to be naked in the shower on the other side of my bedroom wall. And I was going to be naked in the shower with him in my house.

Those who earn their living by puppetry must satisfy the public demand, and so are to a large extent compelled to be conservative. As so often in other branches of the performing arts, it is only the amateur who can safely afford to experiment, to explore new forms and techniques, and to run the risk of failure.

Tutto ciò che di grande e bello c’è al mondo, gratta gratta, non è mai nato da un discorso razionale. Mai.

(Über Bertolt Brecht) aber letztlich war er doch kein Lehrer und kein Volkserzieher. Er war ein leidenschaftlicher Verführer. Möglichst alle wollte er verführen: Frauen und Männer, Junge und Alte, Künstler und Politiker. Und nirgends schienen ihm die Menschen so verführbar wie im Zuschauerraum des Theaters.

When teachers participate in a literary experience with a professionally presented children's play, they are offering their students a text quite different from anything that they will experience within their classrooms. Within this literary experience, teachers join as equals with their students, and each, as audience members within the darkened space of the performance, create their own poems to hold within themselves or share with others.

We are all actors playing different roles in different phases of life. But we must try to play each role to perfection!

When a show ends, for a few days, my body sizzles with leftover energy, like a tree in the wake of a lightning strike.

When I enter the theater and there is a show onstage, it makes me feel safe in the knowledge that the world keeps turning. It also feels like I have died and I am attending my own funeral, so it’s good and bad.

When most dullards hear the words 'the theater,' they envision a twelve-screen multiplex where disaster porn entertains the culturally witless for 90 minutes at a time. Pfaugh. The word 'theater' has grandeur. Power. Back to its ancient Grecian origins, it means 'the seeing place.' A stage upon which actors and actresses use fiction to show us truths.

You are the antidote to any received behaviour. Take a walk when you can. Be alone when you can. Talk to people you care about when you can. We try our best, and somehow it's not enough. We are broken people, the theater shows this. Yet we don't let being inadequate keep us from giving our very best every time. If professionalism has taken the practice of performing to a place where broken human behavior is not acceptable, then it is the medium that is broken, and not the other way around. For at our essence, at our core, we are not professionals. We are amateurs. We are myth, history and advertising, but, still, we exist; we are real, and we are simply beginners. It's how we thrive. We begin and therefore perpetually remain connected to the spark. We ask questions, we thirst, and we learn. And the dissenters complete us, causing us to be better.

When you're in a show, all through rehearsals Tech Week hovers out there like a magical holy grail. In reality, Tech Week is always a train wreck of missed cues, forgotten lines, malfunctioning set pieces and short tempers.

William looked up... through his tears... past the catwalk and lights... past the sky... through the dark and clouds and stars and into the void where he once knew God existed, then turned himself outside-in, alone, and asked, 'Why?

With his dream of a theater program for young people, Larry Wentzler had inadvertently done an amazing thing for all these squirrels. They had a place where they belonged, and, even if it was because he didn't want to deal with their being different, he didn't treat them any differently. Which I think is a pretty successful implementation of Christianity.

You aren’t allowed back until you’ve learned to willingly suspend disbelief.

You never get anywhere until you figure out the difference between passion and compassion.

You know how thick I am. I don't even eat yoghurt because it's got culture in it.

You can't believe people when they look you in the eyes. You gotta' look behind them. See what they're standing in front of. What they're hiding. Everyone's hiding, Wes. Everybody. Nobody look like what they are.

All I know is that as an audience member, I am less and less inclined to go to the theater.

Actually, I didn't like Dartmouth very much, but the whole theater scene I really liked.

Actors are as anxious about the state of audiences as aviators are over weather conditions.

A lot of the old movie theaters are closing down now, which is really sad. It's still in the back of my mind.

And I think I'm an adrenaline junkie, and there's nothing that will spike your adrenaline more than sitting in a theater and listen to an audience react to something you've written.

Also watching a movie on DVD is different than watching it in the theater.

And I started as a journalism major at Ohio State, ended up in theater and I love to read.

Any actor, any playwright who's worked a life in the theater knows how to do things cheaply and quickly. It's just all by necessity. Invention is everything.

And so I've always been fascinated by the technical end of theater, and a lot of my closest friends are not actors, but in the other end of the business.

Anybody that goes to the theater, I think we're all misfits, so we ended up on stage or in the audience.

Anyone can do theater, even actors. And theater can be done everywhere. Even in a theater.

Anyhow, even though I have this home theater, I love going out to the movies. Movies are meant to be experienced together.

Architecture is a social act and the material theater of human activity.

Any show that's bringing in a young audience is doing a good thing, because that's the only way that theater will continue to grow. All the other audience members are going to be dead soon!

At a distance from the theatre of action, truth is not always related without embellishment, and sometimes is entirely perverted, from a misconception of the causes which produce the effects that are the subjects of censure.

As a kid, I had a background in theater.

As filmmakers, we can show where a person's mind goes, as opposed to theater, which is more to sit back and watch it.

As soon as there are 200 people in a theater watching me, I get really scared.

A theater without beer is just a museum

Becoming interested in poetics got me interested in theater. Theater is supposed to be poetry, you know, before it's anything else. It just doesn't fly if it isn't musical.

At this point the theater America is in such a precarious place.

Being creative and making money in the theater is very challenging.

Characters are an extreme form in Shakespeare's theater.

Celebrities in general are pretty democratic, just being in the theater. Plus, I'm from Chicago. But Obama's sensible... he's just a reasonable, sensible human being.

Boxing has become America's tragic theater.