1. What is Theater?

2. “What is Theater?” - Crash Course
A theater is a “seeing place” - a building where you go to see a performance.
The play itself is also theater.
Requires performers and an audience.
Official definition:
A deliberate performance by live actors and intended for a live audience, typically making use of scripted language.
Theories of the origin of theater:
Religious rituals
Myths acted out
Greek drama
Functionalism - explain the order of the existing world
Reenacting historical events
Innate human desire to pretend and play games
Teaching people how to feel, act, or think

3. Ancient Greek Drama - Crash Course
One actor and a chorus of singers
Used masks to switch between characters
The word “thespian” comes from an actor named Thespis, possibly the first to begin acting out characters in songs.
Athens festivals promoted theater (with competitions)
Produced Greek tragedies
Template for modern theater
Catharsis - idea that it was good to get out emotions such as fear by watching plays.

4. “Drama as a literary art” - TED-ed
1000s s
“Mystery Plays” and “Miracle Plays” - religious theater to teach the illiterate
Pageants - giant stage on wheels that traveled
1200s
Guilds - various groups of professions took turns acting and putting on plays
1300s
“Morality Plays” - moved away from bible stories and focused on good vs. evil characters
Often included comedy and encouraged vices rather than virtues
1400s s
Church outlaws Morality Plays and forces theaters to be built outside of cities
Shakespeare’s The Globe theater
Plays focused on man’s inner struggles

5. William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616)
World’s most famous playwright and poet.
His writing is the second most quoted after the Bible.
Some of his famous phrases are often misquoted as bible passages.
Did not attend university.
Married to a woman named Anne Hathaway.
Wrote 37 plays, including:
Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, A Midsummer’s Night Dream, The Tempest, and King Lear
Built The Globe theater in 1599, in London.
“The King’s Men” was the name of his theater company.
One of the first professional writers
Made up words as needed to express himself

6. Why is Shakespeare so important?
Many famous sayings come from Shakespeare:
“Eating me out of house and home”
“Kill with kindness”
“All that glitters is not gold”
Great storyteller with universal, emotional themes
War, spying, murder, love, death, heartbreak, conspiracies, mental illness, family rifts
Many words we use everyday were probably invented by Shakespeare.
His words are part of Western culture.

7. American Shakespeare Center - Blackfriars Playhouse
Staunton, VA
Opened in 2001, a copy of Shakespeare’s own Blackfriars Playhouse
Started with a Shakespearean acting group from James Madison University in 1988
Purpose was to recreate the theater as it would have been performed in Shakespeare’s day.

8. Reduced Shakespeare Company
Comedic, abridged versions of Shakespeare plays

9. Shakespeare or Hip Hop? “To destroy the beauty from which one came”
“Maybe it’s hatred I spew, maybe it’s food for the spirit”
“Men would rather use their broken records than their bare hands”
“I was not born under a rhyming planet”
“The most benevolent king communicates through your dreams”
“Socrates, philosophy and hypotheses can’t define me”
“Then I hope this take away from my sins”
“This was the most unkindest cut of all”
“May the Lord protect me as the world gets hectic”
“My words fly up, my thoughts remain below”
“Count myself a king of infinite space”
“Look around this manor and all you will see is ill-mannered people”
“Froze up like a mannequin”
“Desire too much of a good thing?”