Greek Theater History

Ancient Greece Through my Eyes There is no right or wrong place to start when teaching theater history, it is up to the preference of the teacher. For this summary, the starting place will be Ancient Greece, traditionally described as the birthplace of “Western Theater.” In addition, some of the earliest records of dramatic texts and “play” come from classical Greece. While historians can not time travel to see what life was like in Ancient Greece, they can draw conclusions based on the written and visual material preserved through the years. From this information, historians can draw two conclusions: Greeks were fixated on human existence and order. Philosopher Protagoras explained the Greek ideal perfectly in this quote, “Man is the measure

Since productions are not nearly as in depth or elaborate visually, Greeks used different devices to tell the story such as the ekkyklema and mechane. Greek theater forced its audiences to use their imagination. The actors in the performances were all males who were serving their civic duty to the public, in other words they were not professional actors. Little is known about the actual style of actors in Classical Greece, but historians use surviving artifacts to make assumptions about the style. It should be noted that historians have made the assumption that the performances of the actors had to louder in sound and visually, due to the size of the performance space. One play from ancient Greece that is still performed today, is Oedipus the King written by Sophocles. This play exemplifies the meaning of a tragedy through its tightly constructed plot and the truthfulness of the script. Sophocles’ most notable impact in Greek theater was his choice to lessen the part of the chorus and put more focus on the individual characters. While the action of the show was nothing new to the Greeks, the skillful way that Sophocles wrote the play is what is most notable. It takes true skill to take a storyline that most of the audience knows the ending to and write it in a way that keeps the audience engaged and