Theater Dynamics Quotes

Certainly, I, as an audience, am stricken with terror if I see only two people onstage. And one person, I think, is even harder for people to take.

You don't choose who you sit next to in a theater. You sit in a theater, and there's an energy that happens.

Theater is such its own living, breathing animal. You do a show every night, but it's different every night. Being on stage, you're experiencing a journey.

Actor is just a strange profession, it really is, that you could be in front of the same people for years, and all of a sudden one thing happens, and it finally clicks.

On camera, the audience can see your eyes close up - they can see behind your eyes - and when you're on stage, you need to make sure that the person sitting in the back row can feel what's happening behind your eyes, even if they can't see them. Having a live audience is exhilarating and exciting all on its own, but you know, it is quite different.

If you're a movie actor, you're on your own - you cannot control the stage. The director controls it.

Watching live actors onstage, in something that changes night by night, real people picking up cues from each other, it concentrates you on the process rather than the result.

I understood that I was not the best director in the world nor the worst director in the world. I realized that there is a very mysterious element to what works and what doesn't work in the theater. And it's good to know that from the beginning.

It's part of the job of the actor to torture the director.

The audience perceives only what the actor wants to do to the other actor.

There's a kind of dynamic quality about theater and that dynamic quality expresses itself in relation to, first of all, the environment in which it's being staged; then the audience, the nature of the audience, the quality of the audience.

When the audience comes in, it changes the temperature of what you've written.

Acting is all about relating to the people on stage with you, even in plays that break the fourth wall. Clowning, for the most part, is the opposite. If somebody in the audience sneezes, I can count on it: I don't even have to look at Shiner; he'll have his handkerchief out. It's all about all of us in the room together.

Live theater is an amorphous art, constantly shifting and evolving with every performance.

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.

I guess because theater's so ephemeral and it's gone. You make this nightly contract with the audience and you redraw that contract for the next night, whereas film and television, it's forever. I suppose it's always about adopting personas, never about being yourself. I think they call it a "shy man's revenge."

Actors want to be told what to do - they really do. But they also want to have an input and be recognized for that.

The difference between film and theater is that in film, an actor is sort of under a magnifying glass and everything that they do, just the smallest movement, is very detectible.