Theater

“ The place, with its gray sky and withered garlands, its bared spaces and scattered dead leaves, was like a theater after the performance—all strewn with crumpled playbills. ”

“ In this theater you perceive audience and actor alike occupy the stage, as they used to do in the old London playhouses; and poor little flower girls are pushing their way through our throng, also offering the roses that fade so fast after they are plucked. ”

“ In the theater, bright though the footlights are, and greatly as they dim what lies beyond them, you can still see the white faces of your audience. At least, you do see something—your eyes help you to know the audience is there, and, gradually, you can see perfectly, and pick out a face, maybe, and sing to some one person in the audience, that you may be sure of your effects. ”

“ He decorated the theater with the best paintings of his time, and the ancient, like the modern stage, exhibited temples, sepulchres, armies, fleets, flying cars, and apparitions. He mounted the actors on stilts, and gave them masks to augment the natural sounds of their voices. ”

“ Any consideration of dramatic literature, apart from the actual conditions of performance, apart from the special theater for which any given play was composed, and to the conditions of which it had, perforce, to conform, is bound to be one-sided, not to say sterile. The masterpieces of dramatic literature were all of them written to be performed by actors, in a theater, and before an audience. ”

“ Here we find ourselves face to face with one of the most obvious limitations of the stage—that its power of suggestion is often greater than its power of actual presentation. There are many things, poetic and imaginative, which the theater can accomplish, after a fashion, but which it ventures upon only at imminent peril of failure. ”

“ In the evening to the theater, which was crammed from the floor to the ceiling; they are a pleasant audience, too, and make a delightful quantity of sympathetic noise. I did not play well, which was a pity and a shame, because they really deserved that one should do so; but my coadjutors were too much for me. ”

“ In melodramas like the 'Round Up' and 'Ben Hur,' as in fairy-plays like the 'Blue Bird,' the acting is properly subordinated to the spectacular splendor of the whole performance. When we enter a theater to behold a play of either of these types, we expect the acting to be adequate, no doubt, but we do not demand the highest type of histrionic excellence. What we do anticipate, however, is a spectacle pleasing to the eye and stimulating to the nerves. ”

“ I hope it is beginning to be apparent that intelligent play-going starts long before one goes to the theater. It means, for one thing, some acquaintance with the history of drama, and the theater which is its home, both in the development of English culture and that of other important nations whose dramatic contribution has been large. ”

“ To one who in this way makes the effort to inform himself with regard to the things of the theater—plays, players and playwrights—concerning dramatic history both as it appertains to the drama and the theater; and concerning the intellectual as well as esthetical and human values of the theater-going experience, it will soon become apparent that it offers him cultural opportunity that is rich, wide and of ever deepening enjoyment. ”

“ I myself, as these confessions of mine are describing to you, have always written for the love of the theater rather than from any art impulse and I am the first to admit that my love of 123the theater has always been more compelling than my love of the drama, if you follow me in the distinction. ”

“ Gordon Craig's new book is called The Theatre Advancing, but we rather hope that when it reaches his goal line we will be elsewhere. To our mind the theater is the place where Art should beam upon the multitude and cry loudly, "Find out what everybody will have and don't forget the boys in the back room." ”

“ I will give you all part of some play to masquerade on the stage with, and if any prying spies intrude, you will be supposed to be rehearsing for to-night’s performance. As evening approaches, the theater will be lighted up, and before the real artists arrive you must so dispose yourselves as to be able to join the audience unobtrusively. ”

“ A heightening of effect upon auditor and spectator is gained—to mention one other advantage—by the fact that the story which in a work of fiction may extend to a length precluding the possibility of its reception at one sitting, may in the theater be brought within the compass of an evening, in the time between dinner and bed. This secures a unity of impression whereby the play is a gainer over the novel. ”

“ I'll take you over and introduce you to some of those girls; here's a picture I took of one; she's a daisy. I took her to the theater last Saturday night. You know, it does a feller good to see good shows at the theater. This theater—it's a little place right near my gallery—I go there every once in awhile; they have better shows there than they do at the Opera House; I like 'em better. This was a fine show, 'His Mother's Son.' Yes, sir, it does a feller good to go to the theater. ”

“ The work satisfies a long-felt want for a handy collection of the choicest plays produced by the art theaters all over the world. It is a complete repertory for a little theater, a volume for the study of the modern drama, a representative collection of the world's best short plays. ”

“ XLVII. The Enemy in the Theater
1.The theater, the stage, is not merely nothing indifferent as regards religion and morality, but rather something either highly advantageous or extremely injurious. Undoubtedly the theater wields a powerful influence for good or evil. Good plays of a religious tendency raise the tone of morals. The histrionic art resembles the other arts - poetry, painting, rhetoric, sculpture, and music - in the elevating powers they exercise. ”

“ THE THEATER.—The theatre has always been a vital influence in man's aesthetic and emotional life. Drama, opera, comedy, and burlesque are variant forms, but they are alike in that they influence the audience. In the last decade the moving picture has greatly increased the power and influence of the theatre. ”

“ The resources of a theater which could place so many actors on the stage at once, and attempt the illusion of clouds and angels, bringing into play the machinery of transformation scenes, and enriching the whole with a varied accompaniment of music, must have been considerable. ”

“ The feeling is spreading fast that school and college must include theater culture in the curriculum and people at large are seeking to know something of the significance of the theater in its long evolution from its birth to the present, of the history of the drama itself, of the nature of a play regarded as a work of art ”

“ When our theater has become thoroughly artistic, plays will not, as at present, be stretched out beyond the natural size, but will be confined to a shorter playing time and the evening filled out with a curtain raiser or after piece, as is now so common abroad. ”

“ It is good testimony that we are really coming to have a living theater and not a mere academic kow-towing to by-gone altars whose sacrificial smoke has dimmed our eyes sometimes to the clear daylight of the Present. Preparation for the use of the theater looks before and after. At home and at school the training can be under way ”

“ The modern theater has become highly commercialized, and those who attend the performances continually demand more magnificent scenery, more elaborate costumes, and more thrills. What of the performers? ”

“ Some plays were highly popular inside those theaters. Were these the ones? Mr. Grant White has all reason, probability, and common sense on his side, when he insists that the theater most jealously guarded the manuscripts of the plays that were making its fortune ”

“ The Spectators are about 200. paces distant from the Theater, which being cover'd with a vault, makes the voice of the Actors to be understood to the very end of the Theater. They love Hunting, and Gaming, as Dice, Cards, Chefs &c. At all times of the day, and in all their visits they take Thea and Tobacco. ”

“ The most extraordinary dream I ever had was one in which I fancied that, as I was going into a theater, the cloak-room attendant stopped me in the lobby and insisted on my leaving my legs behind me. ”

“ Fancy parties where the room was saturated with this heroic fluid, theaters where it should be kept at high pressure; what passion in the souls of the actors and spectators! what fire, what enthusiasm! ”

“ Strictly speaking, there are no popular spectacles. The theaters of antiquity held as many as eighty thousand spectators at one time. ... Think of the power in that great assemblage, when you consider the influence of one man on another and the immediate transmission of emotion in such crowds. ”

“ Again at eight o'clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties were lined five deep with throbbing taxicabs, for the theater district, I felt a sinking in my heart. Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited, and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted cigarettes outlined unintelligible gestures inside. Imagining that I, too, was hurrying toward gayety and sharing their intimate excitement, I wished them well. ”

“ He entered his wife’s drawing room as one enters a theater, was acquainted with everybody, equally pleased to see everyone, and equally indifferent to them all. ”

“ The stage is the best mirror of human life; let me therefore recommend the oft use of a theatre as the most agreeable and easy method of making a polite and moral gentry, which would end in rendering the rest of the people regular in their behaviour and ambitious of laudable undertakings. ”

“ With what unction, from an actor’s lips, falls his manifold and glowing praise of theatres! What a pretty picture, a broad wash of rose-purple and white, he can make of the interior seen from the wings! “There’s such a hurry of pleasure to transport us; the bustle, noise, gallantry, equipage, garters, feathers, wigs, bows, smiles, ogles, love, music, and applause!” And again, in another mood: “The playhouse is the element of poetry, because the region of beauty; the ladies, methinks, have a more inspiring, triumphant air in the boxes than anywhere else. ”

“ But when the shadows begin to creep up from below, the place becomes a theatre for the gods, a theatre where there are no spectators, and the actors are the steam shovels with their white plumes and the engines with their black clouds. But they are finer far than any poor mummer's makeshifts. And every now and then comes a burst of applause as a blast is fired more thrilling than ever heard in a play theatre. ”

“ Moreover, in a theatre we must consider, not the marble of its pavements, not the boards of the stage, nor the columns of the back-scene, nay, nor yet the height of its gables, the splendour of its fretted roofs, the expanse of its tiers of seats; we need not call to mind that this place is sometimes the scene for the foolery of the mime, the dialogue of comedy, the sonorous rant of tragedy, the perilous antics of the rope-walker, the juggler's sleight of hand, the gesticulation of the dancer, with all the tricks of their respective arts that are displayed before the people by other artists. ”

“ But in the scale of emotion and excitement the theatre comes next to fighting, whether you be the author of the play or opera to be given for the first time before the greatest and most critical audience in the world, or the actor, or actress, or singer, who has not yet been heard or seen and of whom wonders are expected on the great night. ”

“ And here it will be necessary to say a few words on the stage and on stage-illusion.
A theatre, in the widest sense of the word, is the general term for all places of amusement through the ear or eye, in which men assemble in order to be amused by some entertainment presented to all at the same time and in common. Thus an old Puritan divine says:—“Those who attend public worship and sermons only to amuse themselves, make a theatre of the church, and turn God's house into the devil's. ”

“ III. THE PLACE OF THE THEATRE I THE theatre stands in relation to drama much as the art gallery stands in relation to painting. Its aim is to set off drama in such surroundings and in such light as to bring it within the comfortable vision and agreeable scrutiny of the nomad public. To say that fine drama may produce an equal effect read as acted may be true or not as you choose, but so too a fine painting may produce an equal effect beheld in one’s library as in the Uffizi. ”

“ I said, "is the accidental relish of a single night; whereas the essential and abiding pleasure of the theatre lies in foreknowledge. In relation to the characters in the drama, the audience are as gods looking before and after. Sitting in the theatre, we taste, for a moment, the glory of omniscience. With vision unsealed, we watch the gropings of purblind mortals after happiness, and smile at their stumblings, their blunders, their futile quests, their misplaced exultations, their groundless panics. ”

“ It was once felt that a theatre was not a theatre if it was not adorned with a wealth of gilded cupids, masks, tambours, and daggers, surrounded by stucco wreaths and garlands in high relief, and interspaced with pictured panels of the muses, especially those most at home in a playhouse. And, indeed, about those old houses, their garishness now mellowed, there is a glamor peculiarly of the theatre, and a sweet mustiness in the air bespeaking audiences of perfumed ladies, long since dead, the grease-paint and pomade of a long line of players, old scenery, the fine fustian of the old plays. ”

“ VI It was the theatre, perhaps, as the theatre was meant to be. A place in which one saw one’s dreams come true. A place in which one could live a vicarious life of splendour and achievement; winning in love, foiling the evildoer; a place in which one could weep unashamed, laugh aloud, give way to emotions long pent-up. When the show was over, and they had clambered up the steep bank, and the music of the band had ceased, and there was left only the dying glow of the kerosene flares, you saw them stumble a little and blink, dazedly, like one rudely awakened to reality from a lovely dream. ”