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The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place. It is the place people come to see the truth about life and the social situation. 
Stella Adler

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. 
Oscar Wilde

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When you come into the theater, you have to be willing to say, "We're all here to undergo a communion, to find out what the hell is going on in this world." If you're not willing to say that, what you get is entertainment instead of art, and poor entertainment at that.
David Mamet, Three Uses of the Knife

From the start it has been the theatre's business to entertain people ... it needs no other passport than fun.
Bertolt Brecht, A Short Organum for the Theatre

“All of the arts, 
     poetry, music, ritual, the visible arts, the theater, 
must singly and together create the most comprehensive art of all, 
     a humanized society, 
     and its masterpiece, 
     free man” 
Bernard Berenson

All the world's a stage and the men and women on it merely players.   ~Shakespeare

An actor is part illusionist, part artist, part ham.    ~Oscar Wilde

You need three things in the theatre -- the play, the actors and the audience, and each must give something.  ~Kenneth Haigh, 1958

There are lots of young vital playwrights who are experimenting, and these are the plays that people who are interested in the theatre should see. They should go off Broadway. They should go to the cafe theatres and see the experiments that are being made.
Edward Albee, WNBC TV interview, Jan. 9, 1966

The color, the grace and levitation, the structural pattern in motion, the quick interplay of live beings, suspended like fitful lightning in a cloud, these things are the play, not words on paper, nor thoughts and ideas of an author, those shabby things snatched off basement counters at Gimbel's.
Tennessee Williams, Afterword to Camino Real

"Theatrical Logic"
In is down, down is front, out is up, up is back, off is out, on is in,
and of course - right is left, and left is right.
A drop shouldn't and a block and fall does neither.
A prop doesn't and a cove has no water.
Tripping is O.K. A running crew rarely gets anywhere. A purchase line will buy you nothing. A trap will not catch anything. A gridiron has nothing to do with football.
A Strike is work (in fact a lot of work). And a green room, thank God, usually isn't.
Now that you are fully versed in theatrical terms, Break a leg... but not really!

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