quotations about theatre
Most of the people dishing out judgment have no working experience of the theatre, have not written a professional play, a sketch, or even a joke; have never worked in a theatre, taken an acting class, or published any extended piece of work. They are creative virgins; everything they know about theatre is book-learned and second-hand.
JOHN LAHR
"Questions for John Lahr", The New Yorker, January 23, 2009
Theatre is at last being reclaimed by those who have been excluded from it and used in their own interests -- yet these interests are not solely theirs, ultimately, since they support a just society and true democracy.
FRANCES BABBAGE
Augusto Boal
A theater requires two good producers: one to produce the play, and the other to produce the cash.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
The drama is not dead but liveth, and contains the germs of better things.
WILLIAM ARCHER
About the Theatre
It's really an odd thing, if you consider we gather in groups and sit in the dark silence. And another group gets up on a raised platform and proceeds to create make-believe situations that might be potentially from our lives. It's a pretty bizarre form of entertainment.
DANIEL MACIVOR
"Playwright looks for a 'message of life' in theatre", Times Colonist, May 11, 2017
I love that with a play, a writer creates the script, and then directors and actors pick it up and interpret it and bring it to visual realization. It isn't written, and then read by readers quietly, in the dark of spooky night, all alone. Seeing and making theatre is a communal experience.
JEN DIAMOND
"Interviews with Cohesion Playwrights Fellows, Part 1 of 2", DC Metro Theater Arts, June 1, 2017
The theater itself is so archaic and old fashioned, that it doesn't really matter to me whether it's on Avenue D or at the Helen Hayes Theater. What's the difference? It's still a very nostalgic form. Also, it means you're knowingly walking into a room where there's actors. I feel it's very embarrassing. Because, you know, they're right there. You always think like, they can see you, and I think it's mortifying, frankly, and I hate to sit near the front, where you feel they actually might see you. It's too ... it's too live.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
interview, Index Magazine, 1997
Two strongly influential movements--naturalism and absurdism--have polarized western theatre, arguing respectively for a tidy global perspective of human behavior or for an idiosyncratic local vision, in which ultimately no human behavioral patterns can be abstracted. One is left to choose between existence represented as strict linear determinism or as utter randomness.
WILLIAM DEMASTES
Realism and the American Dramatic Tradition
There are lots of young vital playwrights who are experimenting, and these are the plays that people who are interested in the theatre should see. They should go off Broadway. They should go to the cafe theatres and see the experiments that are being made.
EDWARD ALBEE
WNBC TV interview, January 9, 1966
Stage-plays also carried me away, full of images of my miseries, and of fuel to my fire. Why is it, that man desires to be made sad, beholding doleful and tragical things, which yet himself would no means suffer? yet he desires as a spectator to feel sorrow at them, and this very sorrow is his pleasure. What is this but a miserable madness?
ST. AUGUSTINE
Confessions
It's just lovely to know what you do maybe enables people to enjoy their lives a little bit more. It makes them laugh, and cry, and enjoy theatre. And if I'm doing that, then I feel great. That I can use my talent to help people to enjoy their lives.
MARK HADLOW
"Actor Mark Hadlow appointed officer of New Zealand Order of Merit", Stuff, June 5, 2017
It is important to me that my theatre is a school of learning. Look around at the violence in the world. Surely it is much better to make theatre instead of war.
HERMANN NITSCH
"Dark Mofo's Hermann Nitsch 'action' sparks controversy in Hobart", The Australian, June 3, 2017
I mean there's a certain finality about a movie, when it's done it's done -- that raised eyebrow in that moment will always be that raised eyebrow. Whereas a play only lives as a blueprint for a performance on any given night. There's a reason you can eat popcorn and watch a movie and you can't do that in the theatre. Theatre you have to lean in, you have to tune your ear to the stage and participate.
TRACY LETTS
The Telegraph, January 31, 2014
Between you and me, the critics don't know a great deal about acting, either. The more experienced and scholarly can detect feeble plays without a Geiger counter, even though occasionally they hail as masterpieces items which offend the nose of the property man.
TALLULAH BANKHEAD
Tallulah: My Autobiography
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
preface, The Theater and Its Double
Theatre is not and should not be a literary form of expression. A theatrical celebration can take place anywhere: out of doors, in a garage, in a stable. The problem with avant-garde theatre today is that it is absolutely intellectual. You have to be cerebrally inclined to understand what is going on.
JEROME SAVARY
attributed, Experimental Theatre
I think that's just the dichotomy of the theater, who funds and who comes to watch.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH
interview, A.V. Club, January 13, 2012
[Theatre is] one of the best ways to rediscover one's soul.
SAURAV VERMA
"Theatre with a purpose", Deccan Chronicle, May 8, 2017
Well, I have no mind to arbitrate between the lewdness of theatrical entertainments and of mystic rites; only this I say, and history bears me out in making the assertion, that those same entertainments, in which the fictions of poets are the main attraction, were not introduced in the festivals of the gods by the ignorant devotion of the Romans, but that the gods themselves gave the most urgent commands to this effect, and indeed extorted from the Romans these solemnities and celebrations in their honor.
ST. AUGUSTINE
The City of God
Questions about political theatre always overlook America's most powerful and effective political theatre, which is always thriving: the American musical. The politics is conservative but, to my mind, effective and insidious.
JOHN LAHR
"Questions for John Lahr", The New Yorker, January 23, 2009