Remember that you are in actor in a play of such a kind that the author chooses...For this is your duty, to act well the part that is given to you; but to select the part belongs to another.
As a director you want to have actors, not only surpassing themselves, but also going somewhere, going different places.
Acting is my way of investigating human nature and having fun at the same time
Acting is hard work. At times, it's very energizing and enervating. It's childish. It's also responsible. It's illuminating, enriching, joyful, drab. It's bizarre, diabolical. It's exciting.
It's funny how that comes up, because sometimes I'll write something and I'll think, I don't know if that's a film or a play, and then other things I feel very strongly about them just being plays - they feel very theatrical to me.
It is open to question whether the highly individualized characters we find in Shakespeare are perhaps not detrimental to the dramatic effect. The human being disappears to the same degree as the individual emerges.
I'm the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.
I think acting is a mixture of instinct, imagination and inventiveness. All you can learn as an actor is basic technique.
We shouldn't confuse singers and performers with actors. Actors will say, "My character this, and my character that." Like beating a dead horse. Who cares about the character? Just get up and act. You don't have to explain it to me.
I think acting is an important profession, because acting can give you pleasure and can teach you at the same time, and that is a good thing.
[The play] is like to be a very conceited scurvy one, in plain English.
So, if I ever played Napoleon it would be with an Italian accent. He was an outsider, which also interests me.
My plays have been performed before children, workers, and peasants, and they have well understood the meaning of my theatre. What is needed for people to watch my theatre is a freshness and openness of mind.
As an actor, you can't judge. A great actress from Spain said, "We, the actors, are lawyers of the characters we play. We have to defend them, no matter what."
The director works as an interpretive artist, but he's still an artist, so you also have to give him room to create and to put his vision of the play or his translation or interpretation of the material on the stage.
I enjoy acting when you really hit it right. And I guess I've always had too much fantasy to be only a housewife.
Actors want to do Shakespeare again and again, or want to do Hamlet. When you hear one guy do Hamlet and another guy do it, it's going to be a whole different experience.
Tragedy is an imitation not of men but of a life, an action
I'm still trying to write. I wrote a play a few years ago, so I'm trying to start writing again. The play was called The Commons Of Pensacola. It was at MTC [Manhattan Theatre Club] with Sarah Jessica Parker and Blythe Danner. It was kind of like a riff on Ruth Madoff.
Prior to being in 'Carousel,' I had only seen the movie. So, when I read the script, I felt like it was a lot deeper than the movie portrayed it to be.
There is a temptation for an actor to editorialize what they're doing. And you can't do that with Pinter. It's almost like a musical score. His lines are so specific, but they can mean different things to different people, like an alternating current.
Theatre is poetry that rises from the book and becomes human enough to talk and shout, weep and despair
Now what else is the whole life of mortals, but a sort of comedy in which the various actors, disguised by various costumes and masks, walk on and play each ones part until the manager walks them off the stage?
Doing classic plays is wonderful. It's a wonderful way of developing style.
If you put on an Oscar Wilde [play], it will interest those who are interested in Oscar Wilde. But it won't interest anybody else, because they won't get that wit.
