Greek Theater/Theatre

Theater vs. Theatre

• [Middle English theatre, from Old French, from Latin theātrum, from Greek theātron, from theāsthai, to watch, from theā, a viewing.]

• A building, room, or outdoor structure for the presentation of plays, films, or other dramatic performances.

• Theater – 1. A structure with a stage and space for an audience.

• 2. Metaphorically, the world of drama and dramatic presentation as distinguished, e.g. from the world of dance or motion pictures.

Different Theatres

• Amphitheater

• A circular or semicircular theater with seats arranged in concentric arcs or circles around the stage. The classical Greek and Roman theaters were amphitheaters.

More Amphitheaters

Diagram of Amphitheatre

Forum

Black Box Theatre

• A theater consisting of an enclosed space in which seats for the audience and acting areas for performance can be freely placed at any time in any configuration desired by the producers. Typically the walls and ceiling of the space are painted dark, often black, and the ceiling is fitted with a grid sufficient enough to support lights and scenery as needed in any position.

Black Box Theater

Types of Stages• Proscenium Stage

• An architectural, framed opening through which the audience sees the play. The proscenium is the permanent wall between the auditorium and the stage and has a wide opening that defines the limits of the visible acting area behind it. Its outer surface may be elaborately decorated or plain.

• Example: A frame around a giant picture.

Proscenium Stage

Proscenium

THRUST STAGE1. A stage with a large

APRON thatreaches out into the audience in front of the PROSCENIUM.

2. An open stage with a Back Wall, no proscenium, and seating on three sides

Thrust Stage

Forum/Thrust

Arena Stage/Theater in the Round

• A Stage without backdrop or wings, surrounded by the audience.

• Seats all around the stage.

Arena/Theater in the Round

Traverse Stage

• A stage placed between two sections of audience facing one another.

Periaktos

• plural  Periaktoi,   ancient theatrical device by which a scene or change of scene was indicated.

• It was described by Vitruvius in his De architectura (c. 14

BC) as a revolving triangular prism made of wood, bearing on each of its three sides a different pictured scene.

• While one scene was presented to the audience, the other two could be changed.

Periaktoi

Skene

• Skene, the Greek word from which we get the word scene, was originally a flat-roofed stage building. Didaskalia says that Aeschylus' Oresteia is the first extant tragedy to use the skene. In the fifth century, the skene was a non-permanent building placed at the back of the orchestra. It served as a backstage area. It could represent a palace or cave or anything in between and had a door from which actors could emerge.

Dues ex machina

• Literally, god from machine. Any inexplicable event that saves the situation at the last moment in a play. In the classical Greek and Roman theater, an actor cast as one of the benevolent gods would be lowered into the scene in a little gondola or basket and would magically carry away the hero or the villain. The same idea became a cliché of 19th-century American Melodramas, when the hero would burst into the scene waving the paid-up mortgage on the family homestead just in time to save the pretty girl from marrying the villian.

Golden Age of Greece 500 B.C. to 400 B.C. Athens

• Drama was part of religious celebrations, especially to Dionysus – god of wine and all living, growing things. Note – religion was the mythology – gods were very humanistic – easily angered, sulked, were jealous of each other, made love to humans, etc.

• Theater of Dionysus held 17,00 people

Festival of Dionysus

• Held twice a year, approx. 6 days each time.

• Playwrights submitted plays in competition for prizes.

• Tetralogy (4 plays) – 3 tragedies, 1 Satyr play –comic, burlesque

• Trilogy – 3 pieces (The 3 Tragedies) • Not professional people participated and

selected plays.

dithyramb

• Tragedy derived from this.

• First a crude improvisation based on the myths about Dionysus; it may have taken the form of a rough burlesque or satire.

• An ancient choral lyric, which was sung by the male chorus in honor of the god Dionysus at his annual festivals.

• Chorus in tragedies=derived from this

Thespis

• Thespians

• Introduced actor

• Was known as the first actor

• Actors – were men and boys, oversized costumes, masks, built up shoes – needed to compete with space and chorus

Aeschylus

• Added 2nd actor• Another famous

playwright of the time• Wrote the first tragedy

in the sense the word is used today.

Sophocles

• Added 3rd actor and limited chorus

Euripides

• Satirized religion (religious skepticism)

Catharsis

• Literally, a cleansing. The emotional release that comes from the resolution of dramatic tensions at the end of a drama, one of Aristotle’s seven necessary components of TRAGEDY. Aristotle describes it as a purgation, purification and clarification, the process that resolves PITY and FEAR, which he calls the fundamental emotions of tragedy.

Dramatic Irony

• A secondary meaning within the spoken lines of a scene that seems not to be apparent to the characters on stage, but which the audience understands perfectly.

Tragic Flaw

• Something inherent at the outset of a TRAGEDY, but of unrecognized significance until it is revealed and becomes the cause of the protagonist’s DOWNFALL. Faust’s insatiable greed to re-experience youth, for example, is the tragic flaw that leads him to sell his soul to the devil.

Tragic Irony

• The underlying significance of some factor in the PLOT of a TRAGEDY that becomes paramount and causes and eventual downfall.

Sophocles

The myth of Oedipus (found in Homer’s work) represents the story of a man’s doomed attempt to outwit fate.

Sophocles dramatized Oedipus’ painful discovery of his true identity, and the despairing violence the truth unleashes in him.

Sophocles’ life was sketchy and incomplete

Sophocles cont.

• Born about 496 B.C. at Colonus (a village outside Athens)

• Born into wealth, this set him aside as someone who was likely to play an important role in Athenian society.

• Studied poetry, music, dancing, and gymnastics (subjects regarded as the basis of a well-rounded education for a citizen.

Sophocles…more!

• As a dramatist, he played an important part in this creation of civilization, which included looking backward to ancient traditions and the first epic poetry of Greece, written by Homer.

• Very influenced by The Odyssey and The Illiad.

• Studied under Aeschylus…468 his play came in 1st while his teacher’s came in 2nd.

Still more about Sophocles

• After his death in 406; a cult formed that worshipped him as a cultural hero at a shrine dedicated to his memory.

• Wrote more than 120 plays but only 7 complete tragedies survive.

• As late as 1907, a papyrus with several hundred lines of a Sophoclean play called The Ichneutae turned up in Egypt.

Sophocles and Oedipus

• Oedipus The King (430), is generally regarded as his masterpiece.

• Oedipus The King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone are the best known and most often produced. Although all are part of the same story, Sophocles did not intend them to be performed together

• Many people chose to read them in chronological order:

Trilogy

• Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone

• While other prefer to read them in the order they were written: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus.

The Poetics

• In his Poetics, Aristotle (philosopher) write that the purpose of tragedy is to arouse pity and fear in the audience, and so creat a catharsis – or cleansing of emotions – that will enlighten people about life and fate. Each of the plays of the Oedipus Trilogy achieves this catharsis that Aristotle defined as the hallmark of all tragedy.

Info

• Google images

• Moore, Frank Ledle and Varchaver, Mary. Dictionary of the Performing Arts. Contemporary Books, Chicago. 1996.

• Encyclopedia Britannica