Here are the quotes I had thumbed. Who knows whether the tip about what sells brownies, or how to raise a quarter million dollars are more or less important than the importance of daily physical & vocal training.
My mother, Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood, translated Stanislavski's works on acting. This photo is Stanislavski clowning for a small 5-year-old boy -- me.
It is Sobel's belief that actors need daily vocal and movement exercise as much as musicians need their daily scales.
All the actors, no matter what their age, are in excellent physical condition.
"It is our experience that comedy sells a lot of brownies. Tragedy doesn't sell brownies." -- Sobel
The actors all have their texts in hand along with a pen or pencil. They are doing something Sobel calls a "spine-through." This is an exercise intended to sharpen their focus on the play's line of action -- the spine.
By this stage in rehearsal, the difference between one reading of a line and another is so subtle as to escape me completely. However Sobel and the actors -- like dogs registering sounds too high for the human ear -- can hear what I miss.
"I'm known as an actor's designer. [...] If an actor is not comfortable in costume, he can't give a good performance. Every detail matters. The last button, the last handbag, the last handkerchief, all the little details are extremely important." -- Barbara Bell
"We're looking for actors we can ask too much of." -- Sobel
"The Times reviewer was probably expecting the odes to be songs spoken by a group, separate interludes that don't seem part of the play. The odes are usually the most obscure part of it. What he got was choral speaking that made sense to the play, so he couldn't identify it as odes. We didn't change anything, the difference is in how it's done." -- Sobel
"We don't have a significant deficit now. You don't get that kind of deficit at $180,000 [the Pearl's budget a couple seasons ago], because you're fairly sure of $160,000 of it. You do at $380,000 [the budget for the current season]." -- Sobel
"I don't want to be a different kind of theatre. I don't want to be a theatre at any cost. I want to be a classical theatre." -- Sobel
The patron saint of actors is Saint Genesius.
Levin is the rare actor who has combined a career in serious theatre with one in soap opera. [...] That Monday, he was to play a patient in a coma. He was called for two o'clock, and expected to be in the studio coma bed for less than two hours. His acting would consist of wiggling his finger, twice. For that wiggled finger, Levin would earn more than the eleven-week run of Ghosts.
"It doesn't matter if the actor's upset. It matters if the audience is upset. It matters if the audience is living the experience. That's the purpose of art, to enable us to live the experience without paying the physical price. You can't understand experience in any deep sense without living it." -- Sobel
"Raising two million dollars doesn't start with an application to a foundation. It starts with a serious talk with someone who can write a check for $250,000." -- Sobel
I am reminded of a story Stanislavski told about the early days of his theatre. They'd gone on tour to St. Petersburg. Late on the night before the opening, Stanislavski saw out his window people standing on line in the bitter winter cold. "My god, what a responsibility we have to satisfy the spiritual needs of these people who have been standing here freezing all night. What great ideas and thoughts we must bring to them! So consider well, whether we have the right to settle accounts with them by merely telling a funny anecdote. I could not fall asleep that night for a long time because of my feeling of responsibility. I felt the people whom I had seen in the square deserved much more than we had prepared for them."
"Theatre is not a luxury, it's an essential, it's a cure. It's one of the indicators that you have a solid vital society going. I'm more sure than ever that I should be doing what I want to be doing. That's a great feeling. I doubt that a whole lot of people get to feel that way about their lives." -- Sobel
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