In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect.
In a good play every speech should be as fully flavored as a nut or apple.
It hath evermore been the notorious badge of prostituted Strumpets and the lewdest Harlots, to ramble abroad to Plays, to Playhouses; whither no honest, chaste or sober Girls or Women, but only branded Whores and infamous Adulteresses, did usually resort in ancient times.
It's one of the tragic ironies of the theatre that only one man in it can count on steady work — the night watchman.
My playground was the theatre. I'd sit and watch my mother pretend for a living. As a young girl, that's pretty seductive.
The drama's altar isn't on the stage: it is candle-sticked and flowered in the box office. There is the gold, though there be no frankincense or myrrh; and the gospel for the day always The Play will Run for a Year. The Dove of Inspiration, of the desire for inspiration, has flown away from it; and on it's roof, now, the commonplace crow caws candidly.
The drama's laws, the drama's patrons give, for we that live to please, must please to live.
The novel is more of a whisper, whereas the stage is a shout.
The pit of a theatre is the one place where the tears of virtuous and wicked men alike are mingled.
The primary function of a theater is not to please itself, or even to please its audience. It is to serve talent.
The stage is life, music, beautiful girls, legs, breasts, not talk or intellectualism or dried-up academics.
The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life.
The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.
The theater, bringing impersonal masks to life, is only for those who are virile enough to create new life: either as a conflict of passions subtler than those we already know, or as a complete new character.
The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything — gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness — rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations. To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre.
The theatre is a gross art, built in sweeps and over-emphasis. Compromise is its second name.
The theatre is supremely fitted to say: ''Behold! These things are.'' Yet most dramatists employ it to say: ''This moral truth can be learned from beholding this action.''
The theatre is the best way of showing the gap between what is said and what is seen to be done, and that is why, ragged and gap-toothed as it is, it has still a far healthier potential than some poorer, abandoned arts.
The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form.
The virtue of dress rehearsals is that they are a free show for a select group of artists and friends of the author, and where for one unique evening the audience is almost expurgated of idiots.
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