quotations about theatre
Like all magic cultures expressed by appropriate hieroglyphs, the true theater has its shadows too, and, of all languages and all arts, the theater is the only one left whose shadows have shattered their limitations.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
preface, The Theater and Its Double
In view of my scorn for the theater, its practices and delinquencies, why have I continued to act in it for thirty years? I have no alternate profession. Lobster-trapping? Placer-mining? Smuggling? I haven't the muscles, the equipment or the nerve.
TALLULAH BANKHEAD
Tallulah: My Autobiography
Drama lies in extreme exaggeration of the feelings, an exaggeration that dislocates flat everyday reality.
EUGENE IONESCO
Notes and Counter Notes
But theatre is also a public event, a spectacle or a show, attempting to please or amaze the audience by a display of exceptional stage achievements, that is, special performances. In that sense, like sporting events or the circus, theatre serves what I shall call the performance function: it satisfies our natural desire to achieve or witness something extraordinary.
JEAN ALTER
A Sociosemiotic Theory of Theatre
A trip to the theatre is one of the greatest forms of escapism, but can technology help to elevate the experience to the next level? Maybe the theatre sets of the future will be replaced by powerful projection techniques. Or perhaps head-mounted VR displays will have the power to make the audience lose themselves in a production.
ZOE MUTTER
"Raising the curtain on the future of theatre", AV Magazine, May 4, 2017
When the curtain goes up, it's ours. It's ours to project what the playwright wants to stay to an audience, what to convey and to get a response from the audience immediately. Movies are great fun and wonderful when they're good. But you never get to see them till six months after they're finished. So you never get a sense of whether they're really well liked or how good they are. And you don't really know what the finished product is going to be like, because it's a director's medium.
LAUREN BACALL
Larry King Live, May 6, 2005
It has not been definitively proved that the language of words is the best possible language. And it seems that on the stage, which is above all a space to fill and a place where something happens, the language of words may have to give way before a language of signs whose objective aspect is the one that has the most immediate impact upon us.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
The Theatre and Its Double
By increasing the size of the keyhole, today's playwrights are in danger of doing away with the door.
PETER USTINOV
Christian Science Monitor, 1962
Many in the audience consider leaving.
If anyone leaves, let them leave.
The theatre is not a prison.
If anyone coughs, cough also.
The Theatre is not a sickbed.
We minister to the audience.
We revere the pains of the audience
LEM DOOLITTLE
The Entertainment
Theatre is a living, breathing, collaborative art form. To me, that means that every production is different depending on who's working on it. An emphasis on a syllable here, an arched eyebrow there, can drastically change the interpretation of a line. And it changes depending on the audience in the room.
DIEP TRAN
"When a Writer's Rights Aren't Right: The 'Virginia Woolf' Casting Fight", American Theatre, May 22, 2017
The color, the grace and levitation, the structural pattern in motion, the quick interplay of live beings, suspended like fitful lightning in a cloud, these things are the play, not words on paper, nor thoughts and ideas of an author, those shabby things snatched off basement counters at Gimbel's.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
afterword, Camino Real
It is Mystery -- the mystery any one man or woman can feel but not understand as the meaning of any event -- or accident -- in any life on earth ... [that] I want to realize in the theatre. The solution, if there ever be any, will probably have to be produced in a test tube and turn out to be discouragingly undramatic.
EUGENE O'NEILL
Eugene O'Neill: Comments on the Drama and the Theater
I think a Play the best divertisement that wise men have: but I do also think them nothing so who do discourse so formally about the rules of it, as if 'twere the grand affair of humane life.
APHRA BEHN
The Dutch Lover
I think the tragic feeling is invoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing -- his sense of personal dignity.
ARTHUR MILLER
"Tragedy and the Common Man"
It isn't a shortage of good scripts that ails the theater; it is a shortage of producers who know a good script when they see one.
GEORGE JEAN NATHAN
attributed, 20,000 Quips & Quotes
In short, there is a pestilent congregation of influences fatal to drama, which has actually succumbed to them long ago, though there may be certain nervous twitchings in the dead limbs.
WILLIAM ARCHER
attributed, A Literary Manual of Foreign Quotations, Ancient and Modern
Theatre supposes lives that are poor and agitated, a people searching in dreams for a refuge from thought. If we were happier and freer we should not feel hungry for theatre.... A people that is happy and free has need of festivities more than of theatres; it will always see in itself the finest spectacle.
ROMAIN ROLLAND
The People's Theatre
When we visit, the theatre is empty, but the space thrums with the energy of thousands of performances, of applause, of curtain calls and multiple encores.
SUBHA J. RAO
"Ready for showtime?", The Hindu, June 1, 2017
The theatre is an attack on mankind carried on by magic: to victimize an audience every night, to make them laugh and cry and suffer and miss their trains. Of course actors regard audiences as enemies, to be deceived, drugged, incarcerated, stupefied. This is partly because the audience is also a court against which there is no appeal.
IRIS MURDOCH
The Sea, the Sea
The condition of the theater is always an accurate measure of the cultural health of a nation. A play always exists in the present tense (if it is a valuable one), and its music -- its special noise -- is always contemporary. The most valuable function of the theater as an art form is to tell us who we are, and the health of the theater is determined by how much of that we want to know.
EDWARD ALBEE
"The Decade of Engagement"