Theatre Quotes

“If you have a message, call western union.”

“Know your lines and don't bump into the furniture.”

“A play is fiction - and fiction is fact distilled into truth.”

“Acting is merely the art of keeping a large number of people from coughing.”

“A playwright is a lay preacher peddling the ideas of his time in popular form.”

“If you want to help the American theater, don't be an actress, be an audience.”

“The theater is a great equalizer: it is the only place where the poor can look down on the rich.”

“By increasing the size of the keyhole, today's playwrights are in danger of doing away with the door.”

“I feel that peace has hardly been imagined. It is rarely dramatized in the theater, in the movies, even in books.”

“The theatre is a place where one has time for the problems of people to whom one would show the door if they came to one's office for a job.”

“All the world's a stage / And all the men and women merely players / They have their exits and their entrances / And one man in his time plays many parts ...”

“MARIA: Long live theater...What’s theater?
BERISH: When you do something without doing it, when you say something without saying it, while thinking that you did say, and you did do something—anything—that’s theater.”

“we have to invent new images and ways of power. So far the world thinks of power as violence, that power comes from a gun. We must create a new kind of drama in which there is drama, but it's nonviolent. And this has barely been thought of.”

“I don't like to be my own audience, I find that being my own audience, being in the audience, makes me self-conscious, basically. So I tune in sometimes, with the sound off, to check it out and I back up to it. In the future I will look at it when some time has passed.”

“Say what you like, there is something wonderful about live theater—about any kind of live theater. Professional or amateur, city or boondocks, it makes no difference. The theater turns us into better people, at least for a moment, each time the curtain rises and the houselights dim.”

“We’re all misfits, I guess, in the theater. Otherwise we wouldn’t be here. We’d be out building things, selling things, making money, writing letters to the editor, and paying our taxes with the long form. And on that long form all the numbers in all the columns would add up right.”

“We [Christians] renounce all your spectacles, as strongly as we renounce the matters originating them, which we know were conceived of superstition, when we give up the very things which are the basis of their representations. Among us nothing is ever said, or seen, or heard, which has anything in common with the madness of the circus, the immodesty of the theatre, the atrocities of the arena, the useless exercises of the wrestling-ground.”

“It was with some such ideas in mind that I started on this play. Or else they developed as I wrote it. Or else I have developed them in defense of it now that it is written. It is not easy to know what a play is "about" until it is finished, and by then what it is "about" is incorporated in it irreversibly and is no more to be separated from it than the shape of a statue is from the marble. Writing a play is thinking, not thinking about thinking; more like a dream than a scheme—except that it lasts six months or more, and that one is responsible for it.”

“Hence turn your looks to the abominations, not less to be deplored, of another kind of spectacle. In the theatres also you will behold what may well cause you grief and shame. It is the tragic buskin which relates in verse the crimes of ancient days. The old horrors of parricide and incest are unfolded in action calculated to express the image of the truth, so that, as the ages pass by, any crime that was formerly committed may not be forgotten. Each generation is reminded by what it hears, that whatever has once been done may be done again. Crimes never die out by the lapse of ages; wickedness is never abolished by process of time; impiety is never buried in oblivion. Things which have now ceased to be actual deeds of vice become examples.”

“Any beings who are not devoid of passion to begin with, who are bound by the bond of passion, focus with even more passion on things inspiring passion presented by an actor on stage in the midst of a festival. Any beings who are not devoid of aversion to begin with, who are bound by the bond of aversion, focus with even more aversion on things inspiring aversion presented by an actor on stage in the midst of a festival. Any beings who are not devoid of delusion to begin with, who are bound by the bond of delusion, focus with even more delusion on things inspiring delusion presented by an actor on stage in the midst of a festival. Thus the actor — himself intoxicated & heedless, having made others intoxicated & heedless — with the breakup of the body, after death, is reborn in what is called the hell of laughter.”