THE THEATRE QUOTATION BOOK - A Treasury of Insights and Insults

Makes a great stocking stuffer!

THE THEATRE QUOTATION BOOK - A Treasury of Insights and Insults
Edited by Russell Vandenbroucke. Foreward by Tony Kushner. Published by Limelight Editions. Hardcover, 244 pages.

Titled "The Theatre Quotation Book: A Treasury of Insights and Insults," the palm-sized, hardcover Limelight Editions tome contains 244 pages of words, words, words — all dealing with various aspects of the theatre. As playwright Tony Kushner (Homebody/Kabul, Angels in America) puts it in his foreword, "OK, so a lot of what is recorded here is funny and flip and castoff, and while Hegel and Kant and Aristotle put in their appearances, some of what our hunter and gather has offered us seems a little tatty, a little gossamer to be keeping company with Melville, the Kaballah and the Great Ineffable, but isn't that precisely what theatre is like?"

While that quote may not be rolling off tongues fifty years from now, some others in the book have stood the test of time, such as Kenneth Tynan's definition of a critic as "someone who knows the way but can't drive the car," or Harold Clurman's "We think about the play, but we enjoy the show." Ernest Hemingway is quoted, replying to a Clurman question with, "You ask me if I've written a play? Who the hell hasn't?"

Stella Adler's four words of acting advice, "Speak Yiddish — think British" — are included, as is this exhortation from everyone's favorite esthete, Adolf Hitler: "Art must be the handmaiden of sublimity and beauty and thus promote whatever is natural and healthy."

Right. Jean Cocteau had a more liberal view of the artistic process, noting, "The muses do not lead — they open the door and point at the tightrope," while Shubert Organization chairman Gerald Schoenfeld finds that from his perspective, "There's no profit like non-profit."

The quotes in "Treasury" are organized into a kind of plorm, with a prologue, two acts, many scenes and an epilogue. Scenes are topic oriented, with such themes as "Commercial Success," "Writing Plays" and "Designing Ways." Some lines of dialogue from plays do creep in (e.g., Miss Prism's "The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means"), but the vast majority of quotations were spoken about the stage, rather than from it.