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.
—Sean O’Casey (1880–1964) Irish Dramatist, Memoirist
O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616) British Playwright
The drama’s laws, the drama’s patrons give, for we that live to please, must please to live.
—Samuel Johnson (1709–84) British Essayist
If a playwright tried to see eye to eye with everybody, he would get the worst case of strabismus since Hannibal lost an eye trying to count his nineteen elephants during a snowstorm while crossing the Alps.
—James Thurber
I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won’t contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That’s what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.
—Orson Welles (1915–85) American Film Director, Actor
I had learned to have a perfect nausea for the theatre: the continual repetition of the same words and the same gestures, night after night, and the caprices, the way of looking at life, and the entire rigmarole disgusted me.
—Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) American Dancer, Choreographer
A talent for drama is not a talent for writing, but is an ability to articulate human relationships.
—Gore Vidal (1925–48) American Novelist, Essayist, Journalist, Playwright
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.
—Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) French Actor, Drama Theorist
The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life.
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish Poet, Playwright
I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.
—Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) American Novelist, Playwright
No theater could sanely flourish until there was an umbilical connection between what was happening on the stage and what was happening in the world.
—Kenneth Tynan (1927–80) English Theatre Critic, Writer
We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself.
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) German Poet, Playwright, Theater Personality
The truth, the absolute truth, is that the chief beauty for the theatre consists in fine bodily proportions.
—Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923) French Actress
I adore the theater and I am a painter. I think the two are made for a marriage of love. I will give all my soul to prove this once more.
—Marc Chagall (1889–1985) Russian-born French Painter, Graphic Artist
Theater of cruelty means a theater difficult and cruel for myself first of all. And, on the level of performance, it is not the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other’s bodies, carving up our personal anatomies, or, like Assyrian emperors, sending parcels of human ears, noses, or neatly detached nostrils through the mail, but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has been created to teach us that first of all.
—Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) French Actor, Drama Theorist
Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman when in fact she is my mother, that this person is a chambermaid when it is a young nobleman in disguise, that this well-dressed young man is rich when he is really a penniless adventurer, or that if I do this such and such a result will follow when in fact it results in something very different. All good drama has two movements, first the making of the mistake, then the discovery that it was a mistake.
—W. H. Auden (1907–73) British-born American Poet, Dramatist
Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might have—by disrupting that order—a way of surprising.
—Vaclav Havel (1936–2011) Czech Dramatist, Statesman
A dramatist is one who believes that the pure event, an action involving human beings, is more arresting than any comment that can be made upon it.
—Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) American Novelist, Playwright
The pit of a theatre is the one place where the tears of virtuous and wicked men alike are mingled.
—Denis Diderot (1713–84) French Philosopher, Writer
The unencumbered stage encourages the truth operative in everyone. The less seen, the more heard. The eye is the enemy of the ear in real drama.
—Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) American Novelist, Playwright
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.
—George Santayana (1863–1952) Spanish-American Poet, Philosopher
To treat a “big” subject in the intensely summarized fashion demanded by an evening’s traffic of the stage when the evening, freely clipped at each end, is reduced to two hours and a half, is a feat of which the difficulty looms large.
—Henry James (1843–1916) American-born British Novelist, Writer
It’s one of the tragic ironies of the theatre that only one man in it can count on steady work—the night watchman.
—Tallulah Bankhead (1902–68) American Actress
Good drama must be drastic.
—Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) German Man of Letters, Critic
I think theatre should always be somewhat suspect.
—Vaclav Havel (1936–2011) Czech Dramatist, Statesman
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. He is a kind of psychic journalist, even when he’s great.
—Arthur Miller (1915–2005) American Playwright, Essayist
There was a time when all these things would have passed me by, like the flitting figures of a theatre, sufficient for the amusement of an hour. But now, I have lost the power of looking merely on the surface.
—Lydia Maria Child (1802–80) American Abolitionist, Writer
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.”
—Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) American Novelist, Playwright
Many plays, certainly mine, are like blank cheques. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.
—Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) American Novelist, Playwright
Theater people are always pining and agonizing because they’re afraid that they’ll be forgotten. And in America they’re quite right. They will be.
—Agnes de Mille (1905–93) American Dancer, Choreographer
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