Importance Of Theatre

For thousands of years, people have been arguing that theatre is a dying art form. Many people think theatre is all just cheesy singing and dancing or just boring old Shakespeare, but there is much more to theatre than those two extremes. Theatre is important to our society because it teaches us more about real life than recorded media. Theatre has been around for thousands of years and began as a religious ceremony that evolved into an art form that teaches about the true essence of life. Theatre can incorporate profound, and provocative, observations of the human condition that can transcend time; lessons found in Greek plays can still be relevant to the modern world. People argue that the very essence of theatre is being snuffed out by modern

Theatre is something that brings people together; it needs and audience to exist unlike movies and television. For a performance to happen, anywhere from a hundred to a thousand or more people need to gather in one place for a few hours, and share together in witnessing a live event that may be beautiful, funny, moving, or thought-provoking. Each type can fade in and out of popularity but it is not foreseeable that live performance will ever really "die out". Even in a world where all narrative performances have migrated to video, some musician at some point may introduce a new element of theatricality into their show, or some standup comic will act out something for their routine, people will respond to it, and suddenly we 'll see Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, and Rogers and Hammerstein popping up all over the

Theatre is a more language driven medium, while movies and television are driven by what you see. Theatre relies solely on excellent script, and acting. Theatre has a live element, a more heightened sense of realism. Some argue that we are losing the very essence of theatre, its live-ness, because of recorded media seeping into plays and performances (Trueman). With technology things can more easily go wrong. Lyn Gardner says that if the show relies too heavily on technology, it can cause performances to be canceled completely due to technical glitches that instead of adding to performances, the technology has become the show. The spectacle has began to make actors obsolete, leaving the audience to feel alienated and passive to the performance rather than part of it as they should feel