Theatrical Insight Quotes

I saw several actresses play the part. I did not in fact, as far as I know, do anything that any of the other actresses did. I don't think actresses do that. I think that what we do is we see a role as a role, we don't see it as a person. We look at the role and think, 'What can I, as an actor, bring to that part?

I think every actor wants to play those big parts. In the very first play I ever did, I remember understanding all the characters in it. I always felt I could play anyone.

Much of the day I have busied myself making notes on the small parts in Shakespeare, often nameless, which are rewarding to the actor if only he'll not dismiss them as beneath his dignity. If I can work it up into a talk I might call it, 'Only a cough and a spit ' -the phrase so often used by actors to explain away a lack of opportunity.

It's hard to explain why exactly, but I think that when I began writing plays, it was from an actor's point of view more than anything. I had the feeling that if you put yourself in the position of the actor on stage and write from that perspective, it would give you a certain advantage in terms of being inside of the play.

I think in a play it's wise to just sit back and watch other actors and be able to shape it from the audience.

I think an actor can actually gather moments, memories and emotions for his next character. So, it's a constant work.

[Working with Meryl Streep] I just felt like I was shaving years off my discovery as an actress to realize, "Okay, that's what this feels like."

Ideally, when you play a character, she goes away with half of you, and you go away with half of her. And you learn something.

Thoughts and feelings are suspended in a vacuum unless they instigate and feed the selected actions, and it is the characters actions which reveal the character in the play.

I love Kimberly Peirce. Incredibly intense is a good way of describing her. Brutally honest. Really sharp. She's a director for actors. That's what she's best at, sitting down with an actor and just getting to the heart of what a scene is. And getting to the heart of not just what the scene is and the character is, but what you are, and how to build that bridge between the "me" and the character, and those emotions.

As an actor, you tend to draw on your human instincts and your background, what you've gone through as an individual.

That's why so many people want to play Hamlet: because it's a completely demarked role, and the actor playing it has to be prepared, through the language, to allow the audience to see into who he is.

The good thing about being an actor, and the gift of being an actor, is that you are beautifully forced to see the world with different eyes.

A dramatist is one who from his earliest years has found that sheer gazing at the shocks and counter-shocks among people is quite sufficiently engrossing without having to encase it in comment.

What you would call a 'lead,' I've always considered a supporting part, and what people would call 'supporting parts,' I've considered leads. In a way, I look at it in reverse, because supporting parts - when they're done correctly - are the ones that are progenitors for storylines, to move forward.

Seeing the play ( A Lie of the Mind ) clearly is part of why I wanted to direct it. I see hope at the end of this play. People talk about how dark the play was, but I feel like, if you really look at the darkness, you're able to go through it, and you realize that you can handle dark moments in life and that everything will be all right.

They look so expectant, and then they look so depressed... that was the other great lesson that The Royal Hunt of the Sun taught me, it was the profundity that masked drama can achieve, that of course, the audience were not seeing masks moving at all.