Theater Purpose Quotes

It's wrong to make a living off the theater. Theater should be supported, like redwood trees. You should make your living - whether you're a writer or an actor or a director - in movies or commercials. But you do theater out of love.

My conception of the audience is of a public each member of which is carrying about with him what he thinks is an anxiety, or a hope, or a preoccupation which is his alone and isolates him from mankind and in this respect at least the function of a play is to reveal him to himself so that he may touch others by virtue of the revelation of his mutuality with them. If only for this reason I regard the theater as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone.

It seems to me that the thing that makes the theater worthwhile is the fact that it attracts so many people with ideas who are constantly trying to share them with the public. Real art is illumination. It gives a man an idea he never had before or lights up ideas that were formless or only lurking in the shadows of his mind. It adds stature to life.

When Shakespeare wrote, he wrote for the people. I know he got commissioned by kings and queens, but he also actually was writing plays for people to go and see, to take them on a journey of recognition so that they could see themselves within the characters on the stage. We as actors and theater companies and film companies have forgotten that.

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.

In my opinion, theater shouldn't give advice to citizens.

By whatever means it is accomplished, the prime business of a play is to arouse the passions of its audience so that by the route of passion may be opened up new relationships between a man and men, and between men and Man. Drama is akin to the other inventions of man in that it ought to help us to know more, and not merely to spend our feelings.

You have to think about why you're asking an audience to come to the theater. It's not that they should come because it's good for them, because it's the vegetables that they should eat and the culture shot that they should get... It's about experience and building community and catalyzing dialogue and bringing people together.

Most theater tells you what to think.

What people really want in the theater is fantasy involvement and not reality involvement.

In my theater, I'm not trying to change the world.

It's important for me, politically, to see that theater isn't just about the powerful.

I see the audience as the final collaborator. I think it's kind of bullshit when people say, "I'm not interested in the audience reaction." I'm like, "Then why do you do theater? You can write a book, then you don't have to see how the audience reacts." It's a living, breathing thing.

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

It couldn't interest me less, the idea of putting a living room on stage. I just think, what's the point of walking into a theater to see a living room? A sofa in a forest? Now you're talking.

Maybe what I'm trying to do is heal others. I think what we're trying to do in theater is heal someone.

Theater can be elusive and poetic, but it doesn't thrive when it doesn't reach an audience.

In not-for-profit theater, you don't worry so much about how the audience is going to react. You want to make them absorb the piece.

One of the great values of the theater is a communal search for truth; I believe that sincerely.

Theater should address the stories of its communities, or I don't know why it's here.

When theater becomes a soothing middle-class thing, when it's packaged as the Night Out, then that's the death of it.

Good theater should always send people away feeling changed.

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.

I'd say there are two kinds of theater: one you end with an answer, one you end with a question.

The primary function of a theater is not to please itself, or even to please its audience. It is to serve talent.