10 Arthur Miller Quotes on Theater

Arthur Miller quotes on theater

5. My conception of the audience is of a public each member of which is carrying about with him what he thinks is an anxiety, or a hope, or a preoccupation which is his alone and isolates him from mankind; and in this respect at least the function of a play is to reveal him to himself so that he may touch others by virtue of the revelation of his mutuality with them. If only for this reason I regard the theater as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone.

8. A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance - you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke.

10. The best of our theater is standing on tiptoe, striving to see over the shoulders of father and mother. The worst is exploiting and wallowing in the self-pity of adolescence and obsessive keyhole sexuality. The way out, as the poet says, is always through.

24. The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life.

26. In the theater, while you recognized that you were looking at a house, it was a house in quotation marks ... on screen, the quotation marks tend to be blotted out by the camera. The problem was to sustain at any cost the feeling you had in the theater that you were watching a real person, yes, but an intense condensation of his experience, not simply a realistic series of episodes. It isn't easy to do in the theater, but it's twice as hard in film.

29. Well, all the plays that I was trying to write : were plays that would grab an audience by the throat and not release them, rather than presenting an emotion which you could observe and walk away from.

31. The Crucible became by far my most frequently produced play, both abroad and at home. Its meaning is somewhat different in different places and moments. I can almost tell what the political situation in a country is when the play is suddenly a hit there - it is either a warning of tyranny on the way or a reminder of tyranny just past.

33. I was very moved by that play once again when the Royal Shakespeare Company did a production that toured the cathedrals of England. Then they took it to Poland and performed it in the cathedrals there, too. The actors said it changed their lives. Officials wept; they were speechless after the play, and everyone knew why. It was because they had to enforce the kind of repression the play was attacking. That made me prouder than anything I ever did in my life. The mission of the theater, after all, is to change, to raise the consciousness of people to their human possibilities.

36. I'm the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.

108. Arthur was the last of the three great theatrical voices of the American century - O'Neill, Williams, Miller. ... Arthur's special achievement was to make political and social plays which belonged on Broadway and yet were also powered to reach out into America and way beyond.