Lynn Nottage Quotes

The audience plays a huge part in how a piece will actually form. They really allow the performers to walk a tightrope in a way that never seems to happen in the privacy of your own four walls. I'm listening to the audience, and they're listening to me.

When the audience comes in, it changes the temperature of what you've written.

Your audience gives you everything you need. They tell you. There is no director who can direct you like an audience.

You're very aware in the theater by the response you get, but not so much on television, obviously.

I feed off the audience a lot, their energy.

Movies, you can insulate yourself more from audience, to a degree, and just look at box office. In theater, the audience is a very dynamic part of your process, and you feel much more exposed.

Every single performance of 'Fleabag,' I would learn so much from the audience reaction or how you could change it all the time, and I loved that sense that the performance is ever-growing and changing and could be affected by the audience.

It's hard not to be affected by the live audience.

The last collaborator is your audience ... when the audience comes in, it changes the temperature of what you've written. Things that seem to work well -- work in a sense of carry the story forward and be integral to the piece -- suddenly become a little less relevant or a little less functional or a little overlong or a little overweight or a little whatever. And so you start reshaping from an audience.

There's a guy in the audience with a distinctive laugh. I hope that guy is miked. The only problem with having a distinctive laugh is I know exactly when that guy isn't laughing. "Oh, distinctive laugh doesn't think that joke was funny!"

I love storytelling and I love just relating directly to an audience. That's why we do theatre, it's because we love contact with the audience. We love the fact that the audience will change us. The way the audience responds makes us change our performance.

As far as how much you listen to the audience, you listen to them when they really hate something.

I learn more from the audience than I can from anybody else. Not from what they write on the scorecards, but how they respond to the movie while they're watching it - where they laugh and where they react.

I don't know, on a sitcom, and in theatre especially, you have to really be listening to an audience. And if you're losing them, you can hear the sniffs, and the playbills shuffling and whatnot.

We like reactions - a reaction is walking out on us, a reaction is throwing tomatoes at the stage, that's a healthy psychological reaction.

When you put the musical in front of an audience, you get to see how the audience reacts.

I just feed off the energy of the audience.

When you're onstage, you're acutely aware of the reaction of a particular group of people, because it's like a wave.

I find that after a screening, people really want to come and tell you what they feel.

You can feel whether an audience is tightened up and pulled back. Of course the opposite is an audience like we've been having in LA, which is fabulous.

I like working on stage because there's something very immediate about it, that interaction with an audience where you immediately hear their reaction, or feel them, whether they're with you.

I love the immediacy of an audience being there and reacting. I'm spoiled, having grown up in theater.

The crowd is the crowd. You're gonna take them as an individual performer how you take them. The key is how do you learn from them. How do you use whatever is happening reaction-wise to get better.

I think a lot of audience members don't realize the part that they play in live theatre. The audience actually has a mood. Sometimes they're tired and bored, and we have to wake them up and engage them.

The audience is so important. Because there's something that I might think is super funny, but if it's just not getting the feedback, I have to let it go.