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theater
Building or space in which performances are given before an audience. It contains an auditorium and stage. In ancient Greece, where Western theater began (5th cent. BC), theaters were constructed in natural hollows between hills. The audience sat in a tiered semicircle facing the orchestra, a flat circular space where the action took place. Behind the orchestra was the skene. The theaters of Elizabethan England were open to the sky, with the audience looking on from tiered galleries or a courtyard. The main innovation was the rectangular thrust stage, surrounded on three sides by spectators. The first permanent indoor theater was A. Palladio's Olimpico Theater in Vicenza, Italy (1585). The Farnese Theater in Parma (1618) was designed with a horseshoe-shaped auditorium and the first permanent proscenium arch. Baroque European court theaters followed this arrangement, elaborating on the interior with tiered boxes for royalty. R. Wagner's Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, Germany (1876), with its fan-shaped seating plan, deep orchestra pit, and darkened auditorium, departed from the Baroque stratified auditorium and reintroduced classical principles that are still in use. The proscenium theater prevailed in the 17th-20th cent.; though still popular in the 20th cent., it was supplemented by other types of theaters, such as the thrust stage and theater-in-the-round. In Asia, stage arrangements have remained simple, with the audience usually grouped informally around an open space; notable exceptions are the No drama and kabuki of Japan. See also amphitheater, odeum.

Live performance of dramatic actions in order to tell a story or create a spectacle. The word derives from the Greek theatron ("place of seeing"). Theater is one of the oldest and most important art forms in cultures worldwide. While the script is the basic element of theatrical performance, it also relies in varying degrees on acting, singing, and dancing, as well as on technical aspects of production such as stage design and lighting. Theater is thought to have its earliest origins in religious ritual; it often enacts myths or stories central to the belief structure of a culture, or creates comedy through travesty of such narratives. In Western civilization, theater began in ancient Greece and was adapted in Roman times; it was revived in the medieval liturgical dramas and flourished in the Renaissance with the Italian commedia dell'arte and in the 17th-18th cent. with such established companies as the Comé die-Franç aise. Varying theatrical forms may evolve to suit the tastes of different audiences (e.g., in Japan, the kabuki of the townspeople and the No drama of the court). In Europe and the U.S. in the 19th and early 20th cent., theater was a major source of entertainment for all social classes, with forms ranging from burlesque and vaudeville to serious dramas performed in the style of the Moscow Art Theatre. Though the musicals of Broadway and the farces of ...

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