A theater is a place in which a play is performed if you trace the word back to its Greek origins it means the seeing place it can be big or small indoors or outdoors purpose-built or just borrowed something plays are performed in spaces that aren't theaters at all in 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 knows as closet dramas aren't even written to be performed and that's treater 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 covers a lot of stuff. While most plays use human actors some use human actors there are plays performed by robots and laptops with voice synthesizers there are plays performed by animals and puppets though usually, a human helps out with those the composer John Cage said that theater takes place all the time wherever one is an art simply facilitates persuading one this is the case. The theater is a deliberate performance created by live actors and intended for a live audience typically making use of scripted language we may meet some exceptions along the way looking at you robo actors but that'll work.
There's no origin story for theater that everyone agrees on but there are some theories in the West that at least up until the sixth or seventh century BCE we didn't have treaters as we know them today but we did have religious rituals which can get pretty theatrical ritual are often ways of mediating between the human and the supernatural they can serve to enact or re-enact significant events in the human or supernatural world births marriage death harvests in ritual according to the mythology scholar mircea eliade the time of the event that ritual commemorates or reenacts is made present so ritual represents old stories or ideas and makes them happen now which is lot like what theater does.
This doesn't mean that ritual is identical to theater ritual is scary and theater is usually secular theater ritual can draw on similar mythological sources but ritual typically treats those sources as fact and theater as fiction in ritual the audience often participates in the theatre they usually sit politely unless there's audience participation which is universally adored in the late nineteenth century a group of classical scholars decided to search for the origins of theater they took an anthropological approach and saw theater as a direct evolution of religious ritual this theory got going with James Frazer whom we also discuss in the crash course mythology.
In the Golden brought written between 1896 and 1915 Frazer and his contemporaries the Cambridge ritualists tried to take a scientific approach to the question of the theater's origins he looked around at so-called primitive societies in Africa and Asia societies he didn't know much about and decided that theater had emerged as sophisticated refining of ritual according to Frazer here's how it goes you start out worshipping some kind of god or practice and that worship gets distilled into rituals to attract the attention of that god or guarantee good fortune.
Once your primitive society gets going those rituals generate myths and those myths get transmuted into the theater so eventually you get jazz hands and sequins as the media theorist Marshall McLuhan puts it this view of art becomes a sort of civilized substitute for magical games and ritual art like game became a mimetic echo of and a relief from the old magic of total involvement for an example of the evidence that the Cambridge ritualists drew on to support their idea that ritual evolved into theater let's look at the greek historian Herodotus writing in the 5th century bce describing a ceremony he witnessed in egypt.
Takes the stage through a bubble this ceremony occurs at sunset in a temple some priests attend to a statue of areas but most of the people involved are doing something very different the majority of them hold clubs made of wood and stand at the temple's entrance while other make vows more than a thousand men all holding clubs and those few left behind with status pull a four-wheeled wagon carrying the shrine and the statue which is in the shrine and the others standing at the front gates do not let them enter if things seem tense to you very perceptive probably the clubs that tipped off Herodotus says those who vowed to defend the god strike those resisting.
Rituals myths clowning playing games playing pretend somehow out of all this or maybe out of none of it we get hamilton. The highest moral purpose aimed at in the highest species of the drama is the teaching of the human heart through its sympathies and antipathies the knowledge of itself.
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