An Ideal Theater Quotes

“There were two kinds of hungering, I told them, hungering in the body and hungering in the soul. I wanted to bring together the actor who was hungry in the stomach and the people I knew best, the people of the Virginia highlands, because I had a hunch they were hungry for the spiritual nourishment the theater could bring them.”
― Todd London, An Ideal Theater: Founding Visions for a New American Art

“My impossible dream seemed more urgent than ever and when everybody told me that the idea of a barter theater was insane, I kept at it harder than before. I even compounded my lunacy by saying that we should not only sell our tickets for butter and eggs; we should perform our plays in hinterland towns that never before had known professional theater.”
― Todd London, An Ideal Theater: Founding Visions for a New American Art

“Most of us in the theater didn’t care about bringing in a glowing new order for the ages; we just wanted to act.”
― Todd London, An Ideal Theater: Founding Visions for a New American Art

“A friend of mine who is an orchestra leader said that the first thing people can do without in a depression is symphonies, but if that is true then the second thing they can do without is drama.”
― Todd London, An Ideal Theater: Founding Visions for a New American Art

“The life of a theater is revealed by what it does artistically and by how it does it. Artistic values, then, can also be reflected in organizational structures”
― Todd London, An Ideal Theater: Founding Visions for a New American Art

“the word “amateur” comes from the French for “love,” the love of what we do.”
― Todd London, An Ideal Theater: Founding Visions for a New American Art

“The gifted amateur [has] possibilities which the professional may have lost.” —Susan Glaspell”
― Todd London, An Ideal Theater: Founding Visions for a New American Art

“Theater is local. It can help a people shape its identity. If a theater is to be for a people, it must be of them. If it serves a community, it must be near that community.”
― Todd London, An Ideal Theater: Founding Visions for a New American Art

“Multiculturalism, or whatever you call it, didn’t begin in the 1980s, though we sometimes behave as if it did. Hull-House reminds us that ethnic, racial and cultural diversity is, in fact, our theater’s foundation. Diversity was, simply, our field’s originating premise.”
― Todd London, An Ideal Theater: Founding Visions for a New American Art

“The theater as we know it—the noncommercial, non-Broadway theater—began as an immigrant theater. Its first impulse was to celebrate cultural distinctions while searching for a common tongue.”
― Todd London, An Ideal Theater: Founding Visions for a New American Art