Robert Herrick Quotes

Like hungry guests, a sitting audience looks / Plays are like suppers; poets are the cooks / The founder's you; the table is this place / The carvers we; the prologue is the grace / Each act a course, each scene, a different dish.

All the modern verse plays, they're terrible; they're mostly about the poetry. It's more important that the play is first.

The most important thing you can teach actors is to understand plays.

When we play the fool, how wideThe theatre expands! beside,How long the audience sits before us!How many prompters! what a chorus!

The only way to see the value of a play is to see it acted.

Opening Night: The night before the play is ready to open.

The final evaluation of a play has nothing to do with immediate audience or critical response.

I think it's for the critics to decide whether or not their loathing of the play is based on something other than the play's merits or demerits. They must search their own souls, or whatever.

When you write a play, you make a set of assumptions -- that you have something to say, that you know how to say it, that its worth saying, and that maybe someone will come along for the ride.

A good play is a play which when acted upon the boards make an audience interested and pleased. A play that fails in this is a bad play.

I'm trying to take culture and put it onstage, demonstrate it is capable of sustaining you. There is no idea that can't be contained by life: Asian life, European life, certainly black life. My plays are about love, honor, duty, betrayal - things humans have written about since the beginning of time.

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.

The critics suppose that it is easy to write a play. They aren't aware that writing a good play is difficult and writing a bad one is twice as hard.

I started directing out of necessity, the first play I wrote in college because I didn't know anyone who could direct it.

When you want to put something into your part that is not in the play, you must ask the author-or some other author-to lead up to the interpolation for you. Never forget that the effect of a line may depend not on its delivery, but on something said earlier in the play, either by somebody else or by yourself, and that if you change it, it may be necessary to change the whole first act as well.

A play is a parenthesis that contains all the material you think has to be contained for the action of the play. Where do you end that? Where the characters seem to come to a pause... where they seem to want to stop - rather like, I would think, the construction of a piece of music.

The drama, like the symphony, does not teach or prove anything.

I saw Waiting for Godot when I was 17 in rep with a then unknown actor called Peter O'Toole playing Vladimir. I remember leaving the theatre promising myself that one day I would have a go at this play and then pretty much forgot it for 50 years.

Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental. It is not realistic.

I thought the plays would speak for themselves. But they didn't.

What I really want to do is to write a hilarious farce.

My soul, sit thou a patient looker-on; Judge not the play before the play is done: Her plot hath many changes; every day Speaks a new scene; the last act crowns the play

The old guys like me started in the theatre. I was in the theatre for nine years.

You have to be so confident and so gifted to fill five minutes of nothing at the very beginning of a play before even a word is uttered.

I got cast in a school play and I fell in love with that. I felt comfortable on stage and found out it was a brilliant way of expressing myself and I was happy and I could do it.