Hey there! I'm Mike Rugnetta and THIS is the first episode of Crash Course Theater. Welcome! In the episodes to come we'll have it all: tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral,
pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral-expealidocious. Yup, this series could go on forever. And let me introduce you to Dionysus, Greek god of the theater. And wine.
They can't all be charming, genius birdmen, I guess. In this series we'll explore the history of theater and how we can understand and analyze it.
We'll take a look at significant plays and performances along the way, but in this episode we're going to define theater and look at some theories about how it got started.
So, Prologue over! Act 1, Scene 1, BEGIN! First! Let's define "theater, the building": a theater is a place in which a play is performed.
If you trace the word back to its Greek origins and it literally means "the seeing place." It can be big or small, indoors or outdoors, purpose-built or just borrowed.
Sometimes plays are performed in spaces that aren't really theaters at all-in a park or a parking lot, on a sidewalk, or in a private home. Theater also refers to the performance of plays and to the body of literature and other documentation that has accompanied it.
Some plays, known as closet dramas, aren't even written to be performed. And that's theater, too. So are improvised plays that don't have a script and plays that have a script, but don't use words, like some of Samuel Beckett's shorts.
A familiar definition is that theater requires at least one actor and at least one audience member and that definitely covers a lot of stuff. But - what's an actor? What's an audience member?
While most plays use human actors, there are plays performed by robots and laptops with voice synthesizers. There are plays performed by animals and by puppets, though usually there's a human helping out with those. I hope.
