George Bernard Shaw Quotes

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.

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

In 1977, I wrote a series of poems about a character, Black Bart, a former cattle rustler-turned-alchemist. A good friend, Claude Purdy, who is a stage director, suggested I turn the poems into a play.

'Blackbird' is the only one I've ever wanted to redo. It just haunted me, this play. There was a sense of unfinished business because at the time we did it at Manhattan Theatre Club, there was real momentum to move it to Broadway.

My first play was 'The Room', written when I was twenty-seven.

During theatre, I had never faced problems with my lines and I was very proud of myself.

People assume that actors working in films won't have the time to do theatre. But I make sure that whenever I'm free, I watch a play.

I want to play in as many theatres as possible, work with as many brilliant people as possible, but definitely do a new play.

Whenever I do a play, there are 'Star Wars' fans at the stage door, and they're always lovely - so excited and so effusive about the storylines and the characters. When you're doing something really serious, and the 'Star Wars' fans are waiting outside, it's a nice juxtaposition.

I'm doing a play at Trafalgar Studios with The Jamie Lloyd Company - 'The Maids' by Jean Genet with Uzo Aduba and Laura Charmichael, directed by Jamie Lloyd. It's one of my favourite plays by one of my favourite playwrights.

I'd love to play a lead in the theatre.

When you are an actor you are a very small part of a very large scheme of things.

Normally, you spend the play convincing people of the world and the characters.

In theatre, there is a camaraderie that makes you believe you've been working with your co-actor for a long time.

I bought the book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I paid to have it made into a play and I played in it for six months. I came back and I tried to make it into a movie, without success.

The biggest challenge for me, as an actor, is to be informed, prepared and focused, at the same time. I had to just keep on working, prepping, reading and imagining, all the way through, but the biggest challenge is always to let go of all that and just be open to others. That's what we do, as actor. We play with each other and we stimulate each other, and we have to be prepared to be stimulated by the other. That's always my big challenge.

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!

Everybody knows Aaron Sorkin's scripts. There's a huge amount of lines. There's a huge amount of interchange. You gotta do a lot of learning to be able to get it up to pace.

It's difficult for writers in the theatre. It's difficult for writers in the theatre.

John Cassavetes wrote A Woman Under the Influence as a play. He said, "Hey, I wrote you a play." And I said, "Great, let's read it." I read it and I said, "John, I couldn't do this every night and twice on Wednesday and Saturday".

When I'm editing, I try to bring out some dramatic structure. I think it is about theater in some way; it is a little play.

You write a hit play the same way you write a flop.

What happens in a play is determined to a certain extent by what I thought might be interesting to have happen before I invented the characters, before they started taking over what happened, because they are three-dimensional individuals, and I cannot tell them what to do. Once I give them their identity and their nature, they start writing the play.

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.