Theater Decline Quotes

Will the theater disappear? No. Is it healthy? Also no.

I'm the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.

People are doing sitcoms on stage rather than theater. You go to the theater, and it's as if you were watching a sitcom at 8:30 on Channel 4.

The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.

The fixation of the theater in one language--written words, music, lights, noises--betokens its imminent ruin.

The actors today really need the whip hand. They're so lazy. They haven't got the sense of pride in their profession that the less socially elevated musical comedy and music hall people or acrobats have. The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.

I don't want the kind of theater that I love and grew up seeing to die out.

I miss Broadway, what little there is on Broadway now.

I hardly ever see new plays. They don't have the audacity and daring that they used to.

The old studios that mass-produced dreams are gone with the wind, just like the old downtown theaters that were the temples of the dreams.

I make my living now as a screenwriter! Which I’m surprised and horrified to find myself saying, but I don’t think I can support myself as a playwright at this point. I don’t think anybody does.

You have two kinds of shows on Broadway - revivals and the same kind of musicals over and over again, all spectacles. You get your tickets for 'The Lion King' a year in advance, and essentially a family comes as if to a picnic, and they pass on to their children the idea that that's what the theater is - a spectacular musical you see once a year, a stage version of a movie. It has nothing to do with theater at all. It has to do with seeing what is familiar. We live in a recycled culture.