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Theater Quotes

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Theater Quotes

“The condition of the theater is always an accurate measure of the cultural health of a nation. A play always exists in the present tense (if it is a valuable one), and its music -- its special noise -- is always contemporary. The most valuable function of the theater as an art form is to tell us who we are, and the health of the theater is determined by how much of that we want to know.”

“I grew up in the theater, and you can't improvise Shakespeare and Ibsen. You have to speak the language. But obviously, in a contemporary film, there's often room for improvisation and spontaneous things that happen. As long as I know what I'm trying to achieve in the scene, and when something comes up, I know that the response is genuine, I'm comfortable. That's really how I build everything.”

“Each form of the acting is different. I think it keeps your mind active. TV, film and theater are different disciplines, as are independent films, opposed to studio films. There are differences in the size and the genre, or a period drama as opposed to a contemporary drama, or the types of characters.”

“When I saw what painting had done in the last thirty years, what literature had done - people like Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Faulkner and Hemingway - in France we have Nathalie Sarraute - and paintings became so strongly contemporary while cinema was just following the path of theater. I have to do something which relates with my time, and in my time, we make things differently.”

“These days, most of my interactions with young people are centered on the poetry or theater classes I teach, so the students I know are reading contemporary poets (they love Willie Perdomo) and scripts (No Child, by Nilaja Sun and Twilight by Anna Deavere Smith). I don't know their reading habits outside of our class, but I believe that they enjoy stories that they can relate to, learn from, be challenged by - you know, the usual good writing that every reader craves.”