Classic Play Quotes

Inherit the Wind is a wonderful play, and I was in the original with Paul Muni.

I played Dorothy in 'The Wizard of Oz.' That was my first role on stage.

They changed the floor back to old school. They changed the uniform back to old school. Somebody tell the damn players to start playing like old school.

'Man and Superman,' first performed in 1905, is by common consent one of George Bernard Shaw's greatest and most significant plays, yet hardly anybody performs it today, for the understandable reason that an uncut performance runs for about five hours.

It would be fun to be eighty-five and have a Broadway debut. That's the goal I'm shooting for. When they revive 'Driving Miss Daisy' for the seven-hundredth time.

I'd like to one day play Amanda, the mother, in The Glass Menagerie.

[Fences] is just a great play to bring to the screen.

If you're doing a classic play, where if you do a Chekhov, you do the words as written. You can't do that with a novel; you have to do your version of the words as written.

You hand the baton on, and that's why roles like 'Medea' resonate for years and years, as each new actor comes to it.

I saw Lee J. Cobb in 'Death of a Salesman' when I was about 15, and I couldn't get up from my seat in the theater; I was so... I was weeping, and I was upset. And I find that people are still like that in a similar circumstance in a theater today, where they just can't get up. It's too heartbreaking.

'Coriolanus' has been around for 400 years, and it's going to be around for another 400 years, and nothing I can do is going to mess it up. So, going into it, I felt sort of very free to look at it as a filmmaker does.

The first show I was in was 'Dracula' in 1975.

No producer should revive a play unless they have a very good reason for it. I think there's quite enough about a good play to make it available to new audiences.

I started doing regional theater. My first job was 'The Importance of Being Earnest' at Dallas Theater Center.

'Romeo & Juliet' is still relevant and real.

I'll never forget watching my dad perform in a Shakespeare in the Park production of 'Richard III' in New York.

It took a while to decide I wanted to do Hamlet. It wasn't that I was daunted - I'd been acting professionally since my mid-20s and had some pretty big Shakespearean roles under my belt by that stage, at 32: Petruchio in 'The Taming of the Shrew,' Edgar in 'King Lear,' Antony, Richard III. But when it came to Hamlet, I hesitated.

Just as I was turning fifteen, in the spring of 1946, my parents took me to see 'The Glass Menagerie,' well into its year-long run. I had seen a number of shows on Broadway by then, but nothing like this - because there was nothing like this on Broadway.

There are a thousand ways of playing a good classic. If it were effective, I would play Hamlet on a trapeze.

'Heartbreak House' was a lot of fun for me. I must have missed that day at school. I'd never read it or seen it. It's one of those things that a lot of people are familiar with.

I saw Derek Jacobi play Hamlet when I was 17, and he directed me as Hamlet when I was 27, and I directed him as Claudius in 'Hamlet' when I was 35, and I'm hoping we meet again in some other production of Hamlet before we both toddle off.

Like any classic you hope to get rid of all the varnish that's built up over the centuries where people expect it to be in a certain way. It's a mighty play. It's about a very old king who also happens to be a very old father, so you've got the state and the domestic levels in there together. It's a story in extremis. Everyone knows the end, there's only two people left alive.

It's more than usually possible that I won't do a play again. But Skylight is one of the great plays in the English language. I was lucky enough to be a part of it at one point in its life, and it's a timely thing to deliver it again in the modern world.

I had a high school girlfriend whose mother gave us theater tickets, so I saw the second night performance of 'A Streetcar Named Desire.' My girl and I could not get up during intermission, we were so stunned. To this day it's the only thing I've seen on stage that's 100 percent real and 100 percent poetic simultaneously.

My first, big, silly role at school was as Arthur Crocker-Harris in Rattigan's 'The Browning Version,' where my job was to make school-masters' wives weep with recognition.