Samuel Johnson Quotes

The only reality of the theater exists in the mind of the audience. That audience looks collectively at what is going on on the stage and collectively imagines that this is real.

The truth has got to appear plausible on the stage.

In school, I was Martha in 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' I loved that.

I'd never done a straight play before, never, and it was very hard work - really, really hard work. It was dense, really wordy, and I was determined to learn every word of it - not just skip over bits and pieces.

For an actor, a Mamet play is definitely on the list of things you hope to be a part of before it's time to exit.

I would really have liked to have gone to Broadway with 'A Streetcar Named Desire.' I was proud of that.

When we watch a play under the standard circumstances, we've lost volition and time is passing. A still play feels like an existential threat.

Rehearsing a scene beds a role into you. But sometimes, if you over-rehearse it without unearthing any new meaning in it, you can suddenly forget your lines. You realise that you are on a stage, not in the real world. The scene's emotional power, and your immersion in it, disappears.

Just as the historian can teach no real history until he has cured his readers of the romantic delusion that the greatness of a queen consists in her being a pretty woman and having her head cut off, so the playwright of the first order can do nothing with his audience until he has cured them of looking at the stage through the keyhole, and sniffing round the theatre as prurient people sniff round the divorce court.

If all the world is a stage, and all the men and women merely players, where do all the audiences come from?

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.

Sometimes we go to a play and after the curtain has been up five minutes we have a sense of being able to settle back in the arms of the playwright. Instinctively we know that the playwright knows his business.

Although the theater is not life, it is composed of fragments or imitations of life, and people on both sides of the footlight have to unite to make the fragments whole and the imitations genuine.

There we were - demented children mincing about in clothes that no one ever wore, speaking as no man ever spoke, swearing love in wigs and rhymed couplets, killing each other with wooden swords, hollow protestations of faith hurled after empty promises of vengeance - and every gesture, every pose, vanishing into the thin unpopulated air. We ransomed our dignity to the clouds, and the uncomprehending birds listened. Don't you see?! We're actors - we're the opposite of people!

Acting is not a state of being ... but a state of appearing to be. You can't be eight times a week without going stark staring mad. You've got to be in control.

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women mearly players.

I'm not a theater rat, so I never got a theatrical agent and did a play. I came really close though.

One of the great tools we use in acting is the idea of immediacy, that the audience gets to see you witness something apparently for the first time, so you create a lot of tools to kind of trick yourself into making it appear something is happening for the first time.

I grew up in the theater with my mom and that's how I knew I wanted to be an actor in the first place.

All the world's a stage.

The function of the actor is to make the audience imagine for the moment that real things are happening to real people.

An actor's life is the shadow of a cloud, the echo of a sound, the memory of a dream, nothing come of nothing. The finest actor does not create, he is but a translator of another man's work.

I love theatre - it's where I started - and I've directed a play myself. I'm not sure if I want to direct a film, but certainly, as an actress, I'm always thinking, 'Surely this must be my last film.'

I think a play can do almost anything, because it's also a static form, much more so than in a movie. In a movie you can move the scenery, you can do anything any way. A cartoon, happens in a limited amount of space and a limited amount of time, and you can only get so many words before the reader's gonna get impatient. All of these forms that I enjoy are in a sense a slight of hand, where you have to suggest much more than you really show. You have to, in a sense, seduce the reader and trick the reader or the audience into going with you.

In 8th grade I started doing theatre and I remember it was as though I had taken a trip to a foreign land that I had never seen before yet felt completely at home. I remember feeling a genuine wave of happiness and of feeling complete.