Theater Quotes - Page 2

• The difference - the fundamental difference between theater acting and film acting is that film acting is disjunctive.

  James Lipton

  Differences, Acting, Fundamentals

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• ...I have never known a movement in the theater that did not work direct and serious harm. Indeed, I have sometimes felt that the very people associated with various uplifting activities in the theater are people who are astoundingly lacking in idealism.

  Minnie Maddern Fiske

  Uplifting, People, Serious

  Minnie Maddern Fiske, Alexander Woollcott (1917). “Mrs. Fiske: Her Views on Actors, Acting, and the Problems of Production”

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• I'd also like to do a play. I've never done theater, and constantly changing and refining a performance is something I'd like to do, even though it may sound like work to some people - and it probably is work.

  Nastassja Kinski

  Play, People, Sound

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• It's one of the tragic ironies of the theatre that only one man in it can count on steady work - the night watchman.

  Tallulah Bankhead

  Work, Women, Memorable

  Tallulah Bankhead (1952). “Tallulah: My Autobiography”, p.8, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Idealistic producing is safe. Sensibly projected in the theater, the fine thing always does pay and always will.

  Minnie Maddern Fiske

  Doe, Safe, Pay

  Minnie Maddern Fiske, Alexander Woollcott (1917). “Mrs. Fiske: Her Views on Actors, Acting, and the Problems of Production”

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• I would just like to mention Robert Houdin who in the eighteenth century invented the vanishing birdcage trick and the theater matinee - may he rot and perish. Good afternoon.

  Orson Welles

  Afternoon, May, Vanishing

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• No, I knew when I was doing theater in New York that this was what I was supposed to be doing.

  Vincent D'Onofrio

  New York, Supposed To Be

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• There is something shameful about the death of a play. It does not die with pity, but contempt.

  Mary Roberts Rinehart

  Play, Doe, Pity

  Mary Roberts Rinehart (1931). “My story”, Farrar & Rinehart

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• 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

  Funny, Humorous, Insane

  Michael Shurtleff (2009). “Audition: Everything an Actor Needs to Know to Get the Part”, p.3, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

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• Theater going is a communal act, movie going a solitary one.

  Robert Brustein

  Theatre, Solitary

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• The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.

  Frank Zappa

  Wall, Moving, Tables And Chairs

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• The unencumbered stage encourages the truth operative in everyone. The less seen, the more heard. The eye is the enemy of the ear in real drama.

  Thornton Wilder

  Real, Drama, Eye

  1961 In the New York Times, 6 Nov.

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• We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself.

  Bertolt Brecht

  Feelings, Historical, Theatre

  Bertolt Brecht, John Willett (1964). “Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic”

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• Not to go to the theater is like making one's toilet without a mirror.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Mirrors, Toilets

  Arthur Schopenhauer (1902*). “Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer: Selected and Translated by T. Bailey Saunders”

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• People who are powerless make an open theater of violence.

  Don DeLillo

  Power, People, Literature

  Don DeLillo, Thomas DePietro (2005). “Conversations with Don DeLillo”, p.84, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• So long as there is one pretty girl left on the stage, the professional undertakers may hold up their burial of the theater.

  George Jean Nathan

  Girl, Long, Literature

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• No theater could sanely flourish until there was an umbilical connection between what was happening on the stage and what was happening in the world.

  Kenneth Tynan

  Theatre, Connections, World

  "Critic Kenneth Tynan Has Mellowed But Is Still England's Stingingest Gadfly" by Godfrey Smith, The New York Times, archive.nytimes.com. January 09, 1966.

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• Art, in the widest sense of the word, is the instrument Hellenism has used and would use for that purpose. All the arts, poetry, music, ritual, the visual arts, the theatre, must work singly and together to create the most comprehensive art of all, a humanized society, and its masterpiece, the free man.

  Bernard Berenson

  Art, Men, Together

  "Aesthetics and History in the Visual Arts".

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• Playing in front of an audience was just such a turn-on for me, and you have 200 people in the audience and it's like doing live theater. And filming something that goes to millions of people several weeks later, it's an interesting dynamic.

  Jenna Elfman

  People, Interesting, Week

  Interview with Todd Gilchrist, www.ign.com. June 15, 2006.

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• The show can go on without me, and probably will, but I want to come back to act in Chicago. My wife and I just bought a condo downtown, and I want to do theater.

  William Petersen

  Wife, Chicago, Downtown

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• This...is an age of specialization, and in such an age the repertory theater is an anachronism, a ludicrous anachronism.

  Minnie Maddern Fiske

  Age, Anachronism, Specialization

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• Work for the actor lies essentially in two areas: the ability to consistently create reality and the ability to express that reality.

  Lee Strasberg

  Lying, Reality, Expression

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• Realism is something we practice when we aren't feeling very well. When we don't feel up to the extra effort.

  Robert Edmond Jones

  Art, Practice, Design

  Robert Edmond Jones, Delbert Unruh (1992). “Towards a new theatre: the lectures of Robert Edmond Jones”, Amadeus Press

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• It is necessary to recover the primeval force of the shock taking place at the moment when opposite a man (the viewer) there stood for the first time a man (the actor) deceptively similar to us, yet at the same time infinitely foreign, beyond an impassable barrier.

  Tadeusz Kantor

  Men, Opposites, Acting

  Tadeusz Kantor (1993). “A Journey Through Other Spaces: Essays and Manifestos, 1944-1990”, p.114, Univ of California Press

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• The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form.

  George Santayana

  Real, History, Theatre

  George Santayana, Martin A. Coleman (2009). “The Essential Santayana: Selected Writings”, p.84, Indiana University Press

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