Thespian Quotes

“I made my drama teacher cry. I only took drama to get out of writing papers in English and the teacher was this thespian Broadway geek and here I was this Italian guy from Staten Island and I would put her in tears.”

“Creativity is always a leap of faith. Writers sit down in front of empty pages. Painters stare before blank easels. Thespians rehearse looking toward empty stages. Creativity is experimental by nature.”

“Jake eyed his brother. "I never forget. All data is stored in my memory banks. And one day, candy pig, you will pay.""You 're such a geek.""Thesbo.""That's Jack's latest insult."Seth gestured with his wine-glass. "A play on thespian, since Kev's into that.""Rhymes with lesbo," Jake explained helpfully while Anna stifled a groan. "It's a slick way of calling him a girl.”

“As you sit there watching a performance of a Shakespeare, Johnson, or Marlowe play, the crowd will fade into the background. Instead, you will be struck by the diction. There are words and phrases that you will not find funny, but which will make the crowd roar with laughter. Your familiarity with the meanings of Shakespeare's words will rise and fall as you see and hear the actors' deliveries and notice the audience's reaction. That is the strange music of being so familiar with something that is not of your own time. What you are listening to in that auditorium is the genuine voice, something of which you have heard only distant echoes. Not every actor is perfect in his delivery; Shakespeare himself makes that quite clear in his Hamlet. But what you are hearing is the voice of the men for whom Shakespeare wrote his greatest speeches. Modern thespians will follow the rhythms or the meanings of these words, but even the most brilliant will not always be able to follow both rhythm and meaning at once. If they follow the pattern of the verse, they risk confusing the audience, who are less familiar with the sense of the words. If they pause to emphasize the meanings, they lose the rhythm of the verse. Here, on the Elizabethan stage, you have a harmony of performance and understanding that will never again quite be matched in respect of any of these great writers.”