Theater Criticism Quotes

I wanna grow up and be a critic.

I've walked out of films. But for every film I've ever walked out of, I've probably walked out of 500 plays.

I didn't like the play, but then I saw it under adverse conditions - the curtain was up.

My first play, 'The Colored Museum,' was done in '86 at the Public Theater.

It always bothered me when people came off stage and were told how great they were. They weren't, really, in my opinion. It was then I started thinking that, contrary to conventional wisdom, film was the artful medium for the actor, not the stage.

Writing a play to get to Broadway and have a national tour is a sure way to write a terrible, terrible play.

Don't get me started on critics.

While in some quarters it is felt that the critic is just a necessary evil, most serious-minded, decent, talented theater people agree that the critic is an unnecessary evil.

[On Kay Strozzi in The Silent Witness:] Miss Strozzi ... had the temerity to wear as truly horrible a gown as ever I have seen on the American stage. ... Had she not luckily been strangled by a member of the cast while disporting this garment, I should have fought my way to the stage and done her in, myself.

I've seen some terrible plays, but I generally enjoy myself. One play I walked out of, I have a tremendous respect for the author. That was Robert Wilson, something called 'Network,' which consisted of Wilson sitting on a bunk, the dialogue of the movie 'Network' looped in while a chair on a rope went up and down.

No good play is a success; fine writing and high morals are useless on the stage. I have been scribbling twaddle for thirty-five years to suit the public taste, and I should know.

With my plays, when the lights go down, at least the audience isn't thinking, 'Oh, God, two more hours of this.'

Let us have no ranting tragedies. Too many charactersNot a tolerable woman's part in the play.

It was one of those plays in which all of the actors unfortunately enunciated very clearly.

I think I started out trying to be very objective about the flow of the play.

I take the theater seriously in that I loathe it, I'm bored by it.

I don't think that theater is the higher medium, that it's better than film.

There's nothing in the world more silent than the telephone the morning after everybody pans your play. It won't ring from room service; your mother won't be calling you. If the phone has not rung by 8 in the morning, you're dead.

Please God, I hope my experience in downtown theater isn't over, because I'd love to keep making weird plays. I can't wait for Charles Isherwood to call my next play 'sit-com-y' and tell me to stick to writing television.

An infant prodigy of nine is shoved upon the stage in white. She starts off in a dismal whine about a dark and stormy night, a burglar, whose heart is true, despite his wicked-looking face, who puts the little child in doom, to save her mamma's jewel case. This may bring tears to every eye; it does not set my heart on fire. I'd like to stand serenely by and watch that horrid child expire.

At early previews, the theater gossips are there, wishing you ill every night. They don't grant you any slack. Agents are in from Hollywood. Your friends are there. People who are going to spread the word-of-mouth. If something doesn't work, everyone will know.

As the book writer for one big smash and one big smelly flop, I always wondered if anyone knows just what goes into making a great musical. When a show is a hit, the critics trip over themselves not knowing who to laud and applaud the loudest. It's that marvelous score, those urbane lyrics, that irreplaceable star. But only when a show is a flop, does anyone notice the book writer. And then it's always our fault.

Tom Stoppard, the English-speaking world's brainiest playwright, thinks that British audiences have grown too dumb to understand his plays.

Most theater tells you what to think.

I have always been very fond of them (drama critics) . . . I think it is so frightfully clever of them to go night after night to the theatre and know so little about it.