Theater Etiquette Quotes

I can't sit through plays and musical theatre. I just want to run up onstage and mess up their hair and turn over the furniture.

I swear fearfully at the conventions of the stage.

It is remarkable how virtuous and generously disposed every one is at a play.

In the theater lying is looked upon as an occupational disease.

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

I don't go to that many Broadway shows, so I can't really say anything.

I did so much theater, where everybody I worked with was so much better than me, that I just sort of learned.

One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off. It's wrong to make promises you don't mean to keep.

That's what you do when the curtain is falling--you give the line that the audience wants to hear.

When I go into a theater, I'm very excited to turn off my phone. But then, of course, I get anxiety.

Don't be late to the theater. The opening scene is a goody.

Behind the proscenium arch, you can't always hear what people in the audience are saying.

In some European theaters, it's still not uncommon to have a late start and three LONG intermissions, because people actually eat and drink and converse during the intermissions.

If you miss something in the theater, you are working through it; you'll get it tomorrow. It's easy to forgive yourself in the theater. On television, you do one shot. All you've done rehearsal-wise is be blocked. There is all this pressure to get it right then.

I think theatre reminds us what we're doing as actors, because every night and every matinee day, you have an audience telling you what's working and what's not. And that's very good for us as actors to hone our skills.

In the theater one must sit in such a way that one sees the audience as a dark mass. Then it cannot bother one more than it does an actor. Nothing is more disturbing than being able to distinguish individuals in the crowd.

If you're in a theater, people are texting, all around you. You have the little glowing screens everywhere. Think of how annoying that can be.

Acting takes a degree of mutual trust and respect.

My parents were really encouraging. But I had to teach them the proper way you respond to an actor after seeing a play - regardless of whether you like their performance you tell them how great they are because they have to go on again the next night.

I would like to initiate an initiative - the Broadway Annoying Audience Member Relocation Programme.

I regret to say that during the first act of this, I fell so soundly asleep that the gentleman who brought me piled up a barricade of overcoat, hat, stick, and gloves between us to establish a separation in the eyes of the world, and went into an impersonation of A Young Man Who Has Come to the Theater Unaccompanied.

The frivolity with which all theatrical activity is conducted has one consoling feature-there are no rules of behavior that apply regularly to any part of the theatre.

I come from a theater family and a theater background, and I come from a philosophy that you respect the space you occupy when you work and you put everything that you have into something.

Visiting a show that's already established can be a bit daunting, as they've been a family already, and you're the newbie.