Theater Impact Quotes

'Jersey Boys' has been the most amazing experience ever and has exposed an entire new audience to the music. It's great to see people of all ages coming to the show.

Wouldn't it be grand if we thought that theater could have that impact on the political life of a country?

I realized later how much my acting experience influenced my writing and how it helped me to write for other actors.

I am still so proud to have been a part of something that introduced theater to so many people who weren't exposed to it before. We took Broadway and put it in peoples' living rooms once a week for two seasons. People still come up to me in the street and say, 'I never went to theater before I saw "Smash.'" That's the greatest compliment.

[My father] was very impressed when he saw "Death of a Salesman," I must say. He recognized himself to some extent.

We've all had that moment, the first time you're exposed to live theater, and it's shocking in the best possible way. You see something and say to yourself, 'I didn't know this could exist.'

Great drama is great questions or it is nothing but technique. I could not imagine a theater worth my time that did not want to change the world.

I think 'Hand to God' is going to change the landscape of Broadway. I think Broadway, truthfully, will never be the same.

I know theater can improve the quality of people's lives, and I know theater can heal. I've worked as a doctor clown in a hospital for two years. I have seen sick kids and sad parents and doctors be lifted and transported in moments of pure joy. I know theater unites us.

I mean when the play was on in New York I was starting to get film offers coming through, and since the film's come out I get offered more than I used to, but it happens incrementally.

I think actors have a huge responsibility because of the vastness of their outreach. I am a big believer of the good that film, television, and theater can do, and I want to be a part of that. Throughout my career, I want to keep telling amazing stories and inspiring people.

We Protestants ought to humbly confess that the theater and the sports have done more for race amity, for race understanding than, on the whole, the Protestant Church in certain type, in certain parts of the nation.

I'm doing this play right now, the new David Mamet play. It's called 'Race,' and it's very interesting how people really leave the theater filled with the desire to talk about the play and the issues and the characters, and how they're all navigating their personal views around race.

...no man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor. Even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured into bordellos, his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night.

When I was 14, I saw 'Waiting for Godot.' It's one of those plays that if it's done badly is absolutely dire and can put you off acting for life. But I was laughing all the way through it.

All dramatic realism is somewhat sadistic; an audience is persuaded to watch something that makes it uncomfortable and from which no relief is offered - no laughter, no tears, no purgation.

They say 6 million people see you when you act in a film; it may only be 600 in a play. But the effect on the 600 may be truer and more lasting.

There's no American playwright after 1945 who wasn't profoundly affected - who didn't have their DNA changed by Tennessee Williams.

I believe that theater has to be utterly life-changing for the people watching it.

Live theater is just an incredibly powerful medium, and I think anyone who goes, whether they know about it or not, if they see something that sort of fits with them, it's kind of hard to deny that they had a good time.

If vaudeville had died, television was the box they put it in.

I want the audience, when they leave, to think of the characters on the stage in three dimensions. I want them to have empathy. I also want them to think about engaging more with where we are culturally.

No theater could sanely flourish until there was an umbilical connection between what was happening on the stage and what was happening in the world.

I don't come from an artistic family, so I didn't know what theater was. I was working on Wall Street in the '90s, and I went to see 'Appointment With a High-Wire Lady' at Ensemble Studio Theatre, and it affected me so deeply. It changed everything I thought about the arts. I quit banking and became an actor.

You weren't going to the theater to change the world, but you had a chance to affect the world, the thinking and the feelings of the world.