Quoth

"The important thing is to have a play in which one can feel the author's shaping idea.  In the contemporary plays that I have read there is no author; they are all manufactured in the same factory, in the one machine."

Anton Chekhov
1903

Quoth

"To one side of society lies the academy, the university, with all the attendant dangers of aridity and isolation.  To the other lies what is now called the media, with all its potential for stupidity.  In the middle you find the theatre, the place where, traditionally, through a distinctive mixture of practicality and highmindedness, people (again, like Shakespeare) have been able to develop their own education.  The theatre is what the British have always been good at.  It's worth fighting for, precisely because it's auto-didactic.  It puts things under the microscope and people can learn for themselves.  Art teaches in a way instruction never can."

David Hare
Acting Up

Quoth

"Theatre tells us who we are, and the health of the theatre is determined by how much we want to know."

Edward Albee

Quoth

"Love the art in yourself, not yourself in the art."

Konstantin Stanislavsky

Quoth

"The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it...All the argument and all the wisdom is not in the encyclopaedia, or the treatise on metaphysics, or the Body of Divinity, but in the sonnet or the play."

--Ralph Waldo Emerson. Photo: Patrick Stewart in Waiting for Godot in London last season.

Quoth

"People just think that structure is something separate from what they have to say, but the way we structure what we have to say is maybe the most fundamental part of how we see the world. If you think A causes B causes C causes D, then that's what you believe. If you think A causes B causes Purple causes 136 and then shit happens, then that's your structure. It's really a vision of what you think life is and nobody can tell you what that should be."

playwright Charles Mee in The Dramatist (July/August 2008.) His work can be found at charles mee.org.

First Principles: Storytelling

"Theatre is a pragmatic art form. It's a storytelling art form, and lives or dies by its storytelling."

Tom Stoppard

Quoth

Speaking of famous British director Peter Brook--as I will be in the course of reviewing of the North Coast Rep production of Marat/Sade in the Journal and later here--he makes a number of interesting comments and suggestions about various participants in the theatre process, including critics, in his book, The Empty Space. Here's one:

"The critic is part of the whole and whether he writes his notices fast or slow, short or long, is not really important. Has he an image of how a theatre could be in his community and is he revising this image around each experience he receives? How many critics see their job this way?"

Quoth

"I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished
one's business on earth... I like a state of becoming,
with a goal continually ahead and not behind."
George Bernard Shaw [photo from production of
Arms and the Man at the Shaw Festival. Click for
larger view.]

Quoth

The world is a comedy to those that think,
a tragedy to those that feel."

Horace Walpole

Quoth

"As a dramatist and a poet, he was simultaneously the
agent of civility and the agent of subversion."
Stephen Greenblatt of Shakespeare in Will in the World.
Photo portraying Shakespeare in 1599 from "The Shakespeare
Code," episode of Doctor Who. Courtesy: BBC.

Quoth

"Theatre satisfies my capacity for safety and risk."

Tom Stoppard
(who turned 70 yesterday)

Quoth

"What is the attraction to theatre, to the costume trunk, to make-believe with false faces and greasepaint kits in front of the mirror? Is the point to escape the form I have been put in and by magic disclose the image in the heart?"

James Hillman
The Soul's Code

Quoth

George Bernard Shaw wrote his play, Saint
Joan, for Sybil Thorndike to play. She did
(as pictured above) to great acclaim. So on
the anniversary of the death of Joan of Arc,
this quotation from Sybil Thorndike (as recalled
by John Geilgud in his autobiography): "I hate
pathos. It's soft and weak. But tragedy
has fight."

Quoth

Michael Frayn: "To be part of a good audience is exhilarating."