Joe Mantello Quotes

A play, after all, is a mystery. There's no narration. And as soon as there's no narration, it's open to interpretation. It must be interpreted. You don't have a choice... Each play can become many things.

Being on stage is not creating, it's re-creating.

I do my best creating on stage.

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.

It's insulting to ask a dramatist what his view of his play is. I have no opinion.

Acting is standing up naked and turning around very slowly.

I think it's always funny when you see kids do Shakespeare.

All good performance pieces have some philosophical validity. That's the difference between mere theater and performance art.

I spent so many years of my life as a stage actor and when you do all these plays, a lot of really great plays are very politically driven. They deal with deep social issues, and that's the kind of stuff that I love, as an audience member.

Writing plays supplied for me everything that painting didn't, which is the ability to tell stories in real time, in a real space, in three dimensions, in flesh and blood. I realized I had been trying to cram all this narrative into my paintings, but ultimately painting was a static medium. So it just opened up this whole new door.

While we look to the dramatist to give romance to realism, we ask of the actor to give realism to romance.

To me, what is important in the theater is that we don't want to make a conclusion. We don't want to make a statement, don't want to say what something is. We want to ask, 'What is it?'

Doing my Broadway show '700 Sundays' reminded me how much I love working in front of an audience.

I think theater is more about living and breathing, versus TV, which can vary.

Broadway's never my end goal because of the plays I write. These are tough plays. Of course there's a lot of humor, but my goal is just to reach as wide an audience as possible, however that happens.

Although I have been doing plays since I was 8 years old, it was only when I started doing Shakespeare at age 19 at the Georgia Shakespeare Festival that I felt like my career started.

I wanted to be on stage. That was kind of my plan as an actress in the beginning.

I like the notion of theater as recreational.

There's something about getting onstage in a play where the actor tells the story, beginning, middle, and end, the way they want to tell it. For me, it's the most powerful place to be, and it's the most empowering place to be.

I can relate to anything. I once played Macbeth. I got a lot of laughs, so I quit.

When I was doing 'A Raisin in the Sun' with Sean Combs, we began in bed, and he would give me 10 kisses and an 11th for luck before the play began.

I love comedy, and I always wanted to go that way, but I felt so passionate about drama.

Acting and performing is part of who I am.

I'm not sure plays tell people anything. I think plays include an audience in an experience that is happening in that moment, and that's the specialness. What people take away has almost as much to do with what they bring as what we do.

Theater mode is a different muscle. It's sort of the same acting muscle, but it's extended. Instead of a sprint with movies and television, it's a marathon.