Terry Teachout Quotes

Working on a play is a vibrant and collaborative business. Everyone from the choreographer to the music director to the director to the writers work together toward the same goal, and everyone chimes in on everything.

I did a brief stint with set design and stage design. And I tried playwriting, too.

I'm preparing for a multimedia theater piece, Airport Music, that's coming up in New York City.

I want to toy around with producing a Broadway show.

So I think I'll say the obvious thing: theater is ephemeral. When a production is done, it's gone forever. You can take pictures of it. You can make a film of it. But it's not the production. It's not the same thing.

I would like to direct. What goes on behind stage is very interesting.

The final product in a play is not just the written word. It's the production, the performance. The script is, of course, a very important piece; but it's only one element. Ultimately, yours is one of several voices. People can change your work in a play for better or worse.

With Cold Sassy Tree having its first production, I saw no necessity to do anything other than produce it with the correct setting.

I've always been very comfortable in a set environment. All the collaborating going on, seeing how actors work - it all excites me.

'As You Like It' was the first Shakespeare production I ever did.

I love writing plays because they are living, fluid things that are energised by the producer, designers, musicians, actors and audience.

I would love to do a musical. I would love that. I would have to find the right book, the right story, but some day I'm going to make one. I would really like to go off and direct a musical. That's what I would really like to do when I grow up.

'You Can't Take It With You' has eighteen people onstage at one point. Musicals entail a larger collaboration, and I love that.

I had some experience writing collaboratively when I wrote for the theatre.

When you're doing a legitimate play, if you have a company of 12, it's considered a big cast.

I started out producing theatre in New York.

Theatre is like an actor's nectar, like how cinema is a director's medium.

I've been really lucky to work with a lot of theater directors in the film, like Stephen Daldry on 'The Crown' and Richard Eyre on 'The Dresser.'

Why did I want to become a director? I just had an early interest. My uncle was an actor in a local community theatre, and he ultimately persuaded me and a buddy of mine to come to that theatre, and we went to meet girls, and that turned into interested in kind of behind-the-scenes things, and from that point on, I was focused.

'Hedwig' was born in '94. I was thinking of a theater piece; Hedwig was one of the characters.

A musical is really one of the most complicated beasts. It's a play, and there's music... and there's dancing... it's unbelievably satisfying to get something up out of your brain onto a piece of paper ... and start the process and then see it on the stage.

Filmmaking is a very collaborative art. Unlike a painting that an artist paints sitting by himself, as a director, you have to work with a team.

Basically, we had the idea of doing this production of 'Steel Magnolias,' and we spoke to Queen Latifah about it, and she got excited.

Opera is everything rolled into one - music, theater, the dance, color and voices and theatrical illusions.

In the theater, when people hear that you're writing a play, they want to know what it's all about, whether there's a role for them. You write it fairly quickly, and it becomes a group activity before you're really ready to have company.