Amanda Burton Quotes

Theater, at the end of the day, is about ideas. It's about very large ideas. And if the play is beautifully written or smartly written and has incredible characters you follow on the journey, you take home these larger ideas. Whether it's 'Angels in America' or 'Lucky Guy' or 'Normal Heart,' you follow this moment-to-moment journey as an audience.

My work is to reach people with ideas, hopes, dreams, encouragement, insight, and revelation. That's what an actor wants to do.

It's communication - that's what theatre is all about.

I love the simple poetry of theater, where you can stand in a spotlight on a stage and wrap a coat around you, and say, 'It was 1860 and it was winter...'

There wasn't much for me to do after school except the drama club, so when I kind of started doing drama club, it seemed to be something I could do.

What I learned from doing 'The Graduate' was it doesn't matter what the medium is... as long as the material is inspiring and the characters are well written.

Our job is to make manifest the story, to be it. In a sense, the theatre is such a big star itself, bigger than any Shakespearean actor I could hire, that we should take the opportunity to fill it with voice and verse and movement, not interpretation.

As a young writer, I learned a lot about grammatical structure from reading plays, from performing the plays. I think that was a wonderful apprenticeship.

If the story's interesting and it's a compelling script, I'd be thrilled to be a part of it.

You always remember the delicacy of the work you do on a new play - the delicacy and the rigor and the courage.

And because performing for a game involves real acting. The way they create a game is very similar now to how they create a film. I've always wanted to stretch my acting skills, and the timing being what it is, I couldn't say no.

You have to realize that when I started to work on 'Aladdin', Disney Theatrical wasn't in existence. I suppose I had always hoped that 'Aladdin' would be somewhere on the runway.

Acting and writing go together. Actors write because they love words and becoming other people - we love to escape into other characters.

While I find my job as an actor challenging, I also think that there's fun in that challenge.

When I met Peter Weir, we did a movie called 'Master and Commander' together, and that's when I really started to understand the power of acting, the power of directing, finding the emotion in performance.

With a play, there's more of a definable arc because of the nature of theater: You know, there's no editing, so there's something more natural about the arc a character follows in a play. I think theater is more an actor's medium, whereas film is more a director's medium, because that's who controls the final feel of the film.

When theatre works, it's like nothing else, and when it doesn't, which is often, it's excruciating. It's perhaps not so excruciating when a novel goes wrong, but there is a kind of magic that can and should happen.

Theater is great because you're able to tell a narrative arc without a break. I think it's more about the material and whether what we get offered is good.

For me, playwriting is sharing my experiences, telling my stories.

I learned so much from my life as an actor, as a kid actor through being an adult actor, and then becoming a writer and producer and doing animation.

Our dream as actors is to tell interesting stories about interesting people.

I've had the opportunity to work as an actor and tell stories that transform.

There's a bunch of stuff I want to act in and also create.

I don't find writing for the theater that different from writing a rock song.

It’s more than just saying lines and turning the light on. You have to drive the story - there’s a technical aspect.