Stage Door (play)

Stage Door is a 1936 play co-written by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber. It follows the story of Terry Randall, a struggling young actress living in New York City and the two dozen girls who occupy the boarding house she is staying in.


 * See also Stage Door

Quotes

 * Terry Randall: That isn't acting; that's piecework. You're not a human being, you're a thing in a vacuum. Noise shut out, human response shut out. But in the theatre, when you hear that lovely sound out there, then you know you're right. It's as though they'd turned on an electric current that hit you here. And that's how you learn to act. Jean Maitland: You can learn to act in pictures. You have to do it till it's right. Terry Randall: Yes, and then they put it in a tin can -- like Campell's soup. And if you die the next day it doesn't matter a bit. You don't even have to be alive to act in pictures.


 * Terry Randall: It isn't just a career, it's a feeling. The theatre is something that's gone on for hundreds of years. It's -- I don't know -- it's part of civilization.


 * David Kingsley: When picture people come into the theatre -- when they take a really fine play and put a girl like Jean in it -- when they use a play like this for camera fodder, that's more than I can stand. The theatre means too much to me.
 * on putting film actresses in theatrical productions simply for the publicity


 * Kaye Hamilton: There's nothing else I can do and nobody I can go back to. Except somebody I'll never go back to.
 * discussing her past


 * Terry Randall: You're an actress if you're acting. Without a job and those lines to say, an actress is just an ordinary person, trying not to look as scared as she feels.