Theatrical Presentation Quotes

I thought the plays would speak for themselves. But they didn't.

It's like the high school production of something you saw at Steppenwolf, with the most gifted students in drama class playing the John Malkovich and Joan Allen roles.

We worked on 'Fanny and Alexander' for seven months and it was an amusing production. Still, it was very long and heavy and so awfully complicated, .. And when the premiere was over and everything went well, I thought, 'That's that.' .

All the difference in the world between the movies and the thrill I get out of a play at the theater. Ay, yes! Like fooling around with paper dolls when you could be playing with a real live baby.

A stage play ought to be the point of intersection between the visible and invisible worlds, or, in other words, the display, the manifestation of the hidden.

I'm the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.

You can read a Shakespeare play, but does that mean you wouldn't want to see it on the stage?

I'm definitely not a dancer. I can move well, but it's more about the acting and the singing for me. Acting and singing are completely different, so I can't say which one I love better because I love them both. I love acting because I get to play different characters. But I also love my music because I get to portray me.

[The play] is like to be a very conceited scurvy one, in plain English.

The play's the thing.

It was quite strange, because it's quite different from singing, although it's quite natural because you're used to performing or acting on stage.

Now what else is the whole life of mortals, but a sort of comedy in which the various actors, disguised by various costumes and masks, walk on and play each ones part until the manager walks them off the stage?

I think of a plot, I think of an idea, and then I wonder, How can I get that onto the stage? . . . Whatever devices you use should always be there to serve the theme. If the theme has been overtaken by the device, then something's wrong.

Plays have to be made, and we have to find a way to make them. All of us.

When you are in a good theatre show, it is a wonderful and very fulfilling experience, entertaining a large audience and their showing their appreciation for your efforts.

If you put on an Oscar Wilde [play], it will interest those who are interested in Oscar Wilde. But it won't interest anybody else, because they won't get that wit.

When you come to actually act, it's a game. It may be a very serious game, but it's still a game. If you lose that sense of play, the work suffers.

All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify

Acting has been described as farting about in disguise.

I don't know what acting is, but I enjoy it. I think we ask too many questions of ourselves. We make too much importance of stuff. But I do say to actors when I have taught in classes, or when I sometimes do a talk to a group. I'll say, “If I never acted again, the world wouldn't stop, nor would it stop if I didn't stop acting. That's how important it is. I know it [seems] important when you're young. But I say, “Lighten up. Don't take it all so seriously.” All the gurus and teachers will take your money and run.

I've always said I prefer theater, but there's only ever been one play that I really loved doing, and that was The Seagull.

Theater used to be a verb; it used to be an act. But nowadays it is just a noun. It is a place.

We just had to stay out-of-the-way [in Fences]. [August Wilson] already wrote a masterpiece. And you really don't know how it's going to work until you get it in front of an audience.

As far as I'm concerned all theatre is physical. As Aristotle says, you know, theatre is an act and an action, and he didn't mean just the writing of it, he meant that at the centre of any piece there is an action, a physical action.