People don't understand that when you come into any theatrical experience, you've got to come locked and loaded, that you're a part of the experience, too. You can't come with your arms crossed. Be open to it.
If you really want to help the American theater, don't be an actress, dahling. Be an audience.
The straight man has the best part. He gets to be in the show and see it, too.
If the audience knew what they wanted then they wouldn't be the audience, they would be the artist.
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.
There's something imminent in the work, but the circle is only completed by the viewer.
It's true that writing can give new forms to concepts that existed previously with far less clarity, but in terms of the other half of a story's story - the way a story is received and interpreted and used - the audience plays a part in that too.
One of the things I love about theater, one of the reasons I'll never give it up, is that it's fifty percent the audience's responsibility.
At the core of what I'm doing is a belief in the audience, a belief that populism doesn't mean dumbing down theater, but rather giving the audience a voice and a role in experiencing theater.
Fans are half of an artiste... without someone to appreciate him, an artiste is nothing.
Without audiences, artists would be doing something else, and their creative and technical skills would fall on absent eyes.
It's a product of two poles - there's the pole of the one who makes the work, and the pole of the one who looks at it. I give the latter as much importance as the one who makes it.
The work itself has a complete circle of meaning and counterpoint. And without your involvement as a viewer, there is no story.
A work of art doesn't exist outside the perception of the audience.
When I write a play, my whole intent at bottom is to get the audience to be in the cast, to get that audience on stage with the actors and to get them thoroughly involved in what's going on.
There is a difference between a voyeur and a tender witness. Maybe I think the audience is more of a tender witness than a voyeur, which has a shady undertone.
The audience is not the least important actor in the play and if it will not do its allotted share the play falls to pieces.
People have an idea that the preacher is an actor on a stage and they are the critics, blaming or praising him. What they don't know is that they are the actors on the stage; he (the preacher) is merely the prompter standing in the wings, reminding them of their lost lines.
I've always believed that the audience and the energy that the audience creates is sometimes just as important as the action inside of the ring.
I'm really not a fan of letting the audience live vicariously through stuff.
