theatrical communication Quotes

I'm a much better listener when I'm acting than I am as a person in real life because you learn as an actor that listening is so important. You have to really key into what the other person you're acting with is saying and how they're saying it and react in the moment to what is going on.

It's too theatrical not to express yourself constantly.

And, since they are theater people, they are all talking. All of them. Simultaneously. They do not need to be heard; they only need to be speaking.

Characters on stage, like people in what we refer to as "real life," do not speak to reveal themselves. They do not speak to conceal themselves. They speak to get whatever it is that they want. It is the only reason they speak.

Theatrical times are different from concert times, to put it simply. Taking a figure like [Mahatma] Gandhi and setting him on a stage requires thinking about what theater is about and what the whole experience is about and what we're trying to communicate in that way, so you get into certain less abstract considerations.

We seem to spend a lot of our time in very small spaces spouting a lot of dialogue very quickly.

A playwright... is... the litmus paper of the arts. He's got to be, because if he isn't working on the same wave length as the audience, no one would know what in hell he was talking about.