Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Theater.
The stage is a concrete physical place which asks to be filled, and to be given its own concrete language to speak. I say that this concrete language, intended for the senses and independent of speech, has first to satisfy the senses, that there is a poetry of the senses as there is a poetry of language, and that this concrete physical language to which I refer is truly theatrical only to the degree that the thoughts it expresses are beyond the reach of the spoken language. These thoughts are what words cannot express and which, far more than words, would find their ideal expression in the concrete physical language of the stage. It consists of everything that occupies the stage, everything that can be manifested and expressed materially on a stage and that is addressed first of all to the senses instead of being addressed primarily to the mind as is the language of words...creating beneath language a subterranean current of impressions, correspondences, and analogies. This poetry of language, poetry in space will be resolved precisely in the domain which does not belong strictly to words...Means of expression utilizable on the stage, such as music, dance, plastic art, pantomime, mimicry, gesticulation, intonation, architecture, lighting, and scenery...The physical possibilities of the stage offers, in order to substitute, for fixed forms of art, living and intimidating forms by which the sense of old ceremonial magic can find a new reality in the theater; to the degree that they yield to what might be called the physical temptation of the stage. Each of these means has its own intrinsic poetry.
Antonin Artaud, The Theater And
I submit all my plays to the National Theatre for rejection. To assure myself I am seeing clearly.
Howard Barker
To save the theatre, the theatre must be destroyed, the actors and actresses must all die of the plague. They poison the air, they make art impossible. It is not drama that they play, but pieces for the theatre. We should return to the Greeks, play in the open air; the drama dies of stalls and boxes and evening dress, and people who come to digest their dinner.
Eleanor Duse
A talent for drama is not a talent for writing, but is an ability to articulate human relationships.
Gore Vidal
The primary function of a theater is not to please itself, or even to please its audience. It is to serve talent.
Robert Brustein
The stage is life, music, beautiful girls, legs, breasts, not talk or intellectualism or dried-up academics.
Harold Clurman
I think theatre should always be somewhat suspect.
Vaclav Havel
Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might have -- by disrupting that order -- a way of surprising.
O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention,A kingdom for a stage, princes to actAnd monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
William Shakespeare, Henry V (pr
Education is extremely important to the Hispanic community, as well as faith, and certainly working hard.
Luis Fortuno
Theater of cruelty means a theater difficult and cruel for myself first of all. And, on the level of performance, it is not the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other's bodies, carving up our personal anatomies, or, like Assyrian emperors, sending parcels of human ears, noses, or neatly detached nostrils through the mail, but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has been created to teach us that first of all.
Antonin Artaud
The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything
Antonin Artaud, The Theater and
Theatergoing is a communal act, movie going a solitary one.
I write plays for people who wouldn't be seen dead in the theatre.
Barrie Keeffe
This...is an age of specialization, and in such an age the repertory theater is an anachronism, a ludicrous anachronism.
Minnie Maddern Fiske, Mrs. Fiske
...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.
If a playwright tried to see eye to eye with everybody, he would get the worst case of strabismus since Hannibal lost an eye trying to count his nineteen elephants during a snowstorm while crossing the Alps.
James Thurber
Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman when in fact she is my mother, that this person is a chambermaid when it is a young nobleman in disguise, that this well-dressed young man is rich when he is really a penniless adventurer, or that if I do this such and such a result will follow when in fact it results in something very different. All good drama has two movements, first the making of the mistake, then the discovery that it was a mistake.
W. H. Auden
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
The theatre is the best way of showing the gap between what is said and what is seen to be done, and that is why, ragged and gap-toothed as it is, it has still a far healthier potential than some poorer, abandoned arts.
David Hare
