The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything--gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness--rediscovers its...elf 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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An honest appraisal of the respective pleasures derived from theater and cinema, at least as to what is less intellectual and more... direct about them, forces us to admit that the delight we experience at the end of a play has a more uplifting, a nobler, one might perhaps say a more moral, effect than the satisfaction which follows a good film. We seem to come away with a better conscience. In a certain sense it is as if for the man in the audience all theater is "Corneillian." From this point of view one could say that in the best films something is missing. It is as if a certain inevitable lowering of the voltage, some mysterious aesthetic short circuit, deprived us in the cinema of a certain tension which is a definite part of theater. No matter how slight this difference it undoubtedly exists, even between the worst charity production in the theater and the most brilliant of Olivier's film adaptations.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The theater-goer in conventional dramatic theater says: Yes, I've felt that way, too. That's the way I am. That's life. That's the... way it will always be. The suffering of this or that person grips me because there is no escape for him. That's great art--Everything is self- evident. I am made to cry with those who cry, and laugh with those who laugh. But the theater-goer in the epic theater says: I would never have thought that. You can't do that. That's very strange, practically unbelievable. That has to stop. The suffering of this or that person grips me because there is an escape for him. That's great art--nothing is self-evident. I am made to laugh about those who cry, and cry about those who laugh.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is not enough to demand insight and informative images of reality from the theater. Our theater must stimulate a desire for und...erstanding, a delight in changing reality. Our audience must experience not only the ways to free Prometheus, but be schooled in the very desire to free him. Theater must teach all the pleasures and joys of discovery, all the feelings of triumph associated with liberation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The alienation effect in German epic theater is achieved not only through the actors, but also through music (chorus and song) and... sets (transparencies, film strips, etc.). Its main purpose is to place the staged events in their historical context.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Very roughly, the drama may be called that part of theatrical art which lends itself most readily to intellectual discussion; what... is left is theater. Drama is immensely durable; after a thousand critical disputes, it is still there, undiminished, ready for the next wranglers. Theater is magical and evanescent; examine it closely and it turns into tricks of lighting, or the grace of a particular gesture, or the tone of a voice--and these are not its substance, but the rubbish that is left when magic has departed. Theater is the response, the echo, which drama awakens within us when we see it on the stage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The art of the theater--notoriously an "impure" art--seems to be as close to the art of politics as it is to poetry, painting or m...usic. The theater artist, whether actor or playwright, depends on the interest and support of an audience, just as the politician depends upon his constituency. The politician cannot practice his art at all without a grant from his constituency; and so he must first of all woo it. And the theater artist cannot practice his art without real people assembled before a real stage; a theater without an audience is a contradiction in terms. That is why both politics and the theater are necessarily so close to the public mood and the public mind of their times.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have the greatest aversion to being a candidate on a ticket with a man whose record as an upright public man is to be in questio...n--to be defended from the beginning to the end.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The audience is the most revered member of the theater. Without an audience there is no theater. Every technique learned by the ac...tor, every curtain, every flat on the stage, every careful analysis by the director, every coordinated scene, is for the enjoyment of the audience. They are our guests, our evaluators, and the last spoke in the wheel which can then begin to roll. They make the performance meaningful.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »