Edward Albee Quotes

Talking to actors is the same as talking to any other artists; it's getting into the moment for them, and making sure they can lose themselves in the performance!

Doing Shakespeare once is not fair to the play. I have been in Shakespeare plays when it's not until the last two or three performances when I even understand certain things. In the old days star actors would travel the world doing the same parts over and over again.

Actors take risks all the time. We put ourselves on the line. It is creative to be able to interpret someone's words and breathe life into them.

Auditioning is always so different for different things.

When I work with a character like Valjean on stage, I get totally absorbed in that man. I become that man. But there's always, outside of that, the third eye, which watches what you're doing. And you can say to yourself, 'I'm crying well' or 'I'm being angry well.' But there's always that element there, and it never stops.

It's funny how that comes up, because sometimes I'll write something and I'll think, I don't know if that's a film or a play, and then other things I feel very strongly about them just being plays - they feel very theatrical to me.

The collaboration really begins once the rehearsal starts. This is when the actor takes his place, because he becomes the one who is going to bring the words of the author off the page.

Acting is an imaginative leap, really. And imaginations prosper in different circumstances. And it's being able - I can't tell you how one does, but one tries to read those circumstances correctly.

The theatre-acting, creating, interpreting - means total involvement, the totality of heart, mind and spirit.

Actors are the jockeys of literature. Others supply the horses, the plays, and we simply make them run.

It's a little bit odd. The first time you do the play, you kind of throw yourself into it, trying to get the most out of all the individual moments. Then, a few hours later, you're still there, wondering what you could possibly do differently than what you just did a couple hours ago.

Acting is hard work. At times, it's very energizing and enervating. It's childish. It's also responsible. It's illuminating, enriching, joyful, drab. It's bizarre, diabolical. It's exciting.

Acting is an imaginative leap, really, isn't it? And imaginations prosper in different circumstances. And it's being able - I can't tell you how one does, but one tries to read those circumstances correctly.

I discover that I am thinking about a play, which is the first awareness I have that a new play is forming. When I'm aware of the play forming in my head, it's already at a certain degree in development.

It's not most important to communicate myself on stage as it is to be as funny or interesting as I possibly can on stage. I feel more like I'm doing a play whose main character just happens to share my name.

I wouldnt call acting a job - its a pleasure. I love getting to play different characters, getting to play dress up, and getting paid for it.

What I like about acting is that you have to be super, super present in the moment. That's not something that comes to me naturally. But if you take the long view on anything, nothing can really affect you or knock you down. It's like, we're here for a blink, we're just the human experiment, one of many experiments going on in the universe, and it's interesting, it's beautiful by fits and starts, but I can't take it that personally. I'm just one of billions of people attempting.

I'm still trying to write. I wrote a play a few years ago, so I'm trying to start writing again. The play was called The Commons Of Pensacola. It was at MTC [Manhattan Theatre Club] with Sarah Jessica Parker and Blythe Danner. It was kind of like a riff on Ruth Madoff.

I come alive when I have assisted in bringing out the printed word on the stage, you know, and I enjoy directing plays. It's a tactile process, theatre, unlike a number of other forms of the creative work.

A play for me never really takes on an aspect of reality until it has left the dryair of the study and begins to sniff the musty breezes of a bare stage.

In the case of drama (stage, movies, television ), there appear to be people in almost every audience who never quite fully realize that a play is a set of fictional, symbolic representations. An actor is one who symbolizes other people, real or imagined. [...] Also some years ago it was reported that when Edward G. Robinson, who used to play gangster roles with extraordinary vividness, visited Chicago, local hoodlums would telephone him at his hotel to pay their professional respects.

I love the process of acting, simply because I like to play make believe. But for me, it is purely make believe and it is a process of playing.

I tried to avoid making plays or films that weren't telling a story that I felt was important. And what I discovered in the process is, it makes you more empathic because you have to enter someone else's reality and you learn to see through many other people's eyes.

We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.

I separate the performer from the private citizen because it works for me. That gives the surprise element to my show. It doesn't change my playing. But if in a business suit they would think I was crazy. It's like putting Marlene Dietrich in a housedress.