Elizabeth Meriwether Quotes

Good actors can tell you more about your play than 1,000 hours alone at your desk.

I still feel I belong to the theatre. There is nothing more challenging and exciting for an actor than performing before a live audience. The stage is the real testing ground for an actor.

There's a tremendous amount to be gained from being a performer, and being an artist, and being an actor.

I don't look back. I look forward and plan new shows. That's really feeding the most important part of working in the theater.

Theater is a living creature. It takes a while to break in, like a new pair of shoes.

As an actor, you're always at the service of somebody else's vision. In a play, it's more of the director's vision, and he or she's got their hands on you all the way up to opening night, and if it's a film, there are even more people.

I think a director can make a play happen before your eyes so that you are part of it and it is part of you. If you can get it right, there's no mystery. It's not about mystery. It's not even mysterious. It's about our lives.

For my part, I like live theater best when it's taut, concentrated and intimate.

I've been in leadership roles on Broadway, and it's one thing to lead a Broadway company - you're with those people for a year straight, and you're doing that same show, eight shows a week. It's quite another when you carry on the story... You go beyond that, and you ride the wave of a character.

I'm someone who started in the theater and really couldn't stand repeating the show. My favorite part of acting is the five or six weeks of rehearsal that you get. I like doing previews; I like the opening week because my friends and family come, and then after that, I don't want to do it anymore.

The beauty of making theater is that you have to go and do it the next day. Making a show nightly is a really difficult skill. It's something every theater actor and every theater maker is challenged with.

As an artist, you're thankful to get a shot at a story more than once, because it doesn't happen all the time. Whether you talk about 'Hamlet' or 'Death of a Salesman,' you always want to see what the next group of actors will do.

When you're in a good play and a good production, you find that you're in something that has a life beyond you. You think, 'Oh my goodness, this play's alive.'

I did a theater program the summer of my junior year, and that's when I really fell in love with the craft of acting. It became more about the craft and less about being a working actor.

Film and stage are very different; I don't necessarily prefer one over the other. Every few years, I get a big itch to go back to the theater. To learn humility, to learn bravery and to remind yourself that the pistons that drive your craft are working on full power. And to remind yourself how badly paid actors can be.

But theatre is always a difficult experience.

I really love to act; I love everything about it. I've never had this addiction to being known. I mean, sure, if you go into acting, there's part of you that is saying, 'I want attention' but I was brought up to work to deserve attention, and it is the work, not the trappings that are important.

I want to break into the acting industry. It's something I have a great deal of respect for; it's a passion of mine. It's so amazing, the differences between acting and being an athlete, but the one commonality is they both evoke emotion in the viewer. And those emotions are real. So I think that's pretty cool.

As I told you, from the time I was fifteen, I thought the theater was too much involved with actors trying to make the audience love them, being over emotional.

I love doing theater so much - being in front of an audience and seeing how a character grows and develops with every performance.

I feel that once you go into rehearsal, you need to focus on the show in the room.

I'm sort of one of those weird actors who whenever I do a play, I think, 'Oh, we should film this,' as opposed to have to belt it out of ourselves in a theater auditorium.

Being an actor in movies is a lot about the power of your imagination and making the circumstance real to you so the audience will feel that it's real.

Backstage life is terrific training for an actor, seeing shows from the wings.

I'm a kid who did stock and summer youth theater where we'd put up two shows and you had no rehearsal. I've also understudied, where I've had to go on with no rehearsal.