Theatre, often spelled "theater" in the United States, is a type of collaborative artistic presentation that involves performers acting out roles in a scripted performance. Theatre differs from motion pictures and films in that theatrical performances are performed live in front of an audience, rather than prerecorded. Hundreds of different varieties of theatre have developed around the world.
Theatrical performances originated from the spiritual rituals found in prehistoric human societies. Over centuries of development, these performances became a form of artistic expression and recreational entertainment. Separate theatrical traditions exist in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere, but the type of theatre most common in the United States is a direct descendent of theatre from ancient Greece.
Ancient Greek theatre flourished in the fifth and sixth centuries BCE and was among the most popular forms of public entertainment. A relatively small number of famous playwrights contributed pieces that were performed at public theatres across Greece but primarily in the city of Athens, which was the center of Greek artistic culture. The Greeks developed plays of several characteristic varieties that are still represented in modern theatre: the tragedy, the comedy, and the satire, which blended comedic and tragic elements.
The Catholic Church began to utilize theatrical performances in the Middle Ages, presenting religious stories in theatrical form. This became one of the major modes of theatrical expression until the European Renaissance. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, European playwrights such as William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe caused a major revival in the popular play as a public attraction. The plays produced by these authors became the nucleus of modern theatre in the Western world.
Between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, theatre was largely dominated by either the Catholic Church or the tastes of European nobility, and most playwrights attempted to appeal to one or both of these audiences. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a popular theatre movement emerged and spread from Europe to the United States, including plays written for common consumption and featuring characters that represented the lives of workers and lower-class individuals.
By the twentieth century, popular theatre had become highly commercialized, and large commercial theatres were established in most major US and European cities. While mainstream theatre became dominant in the entertainment industry, with professional actors and professional playwrights, many towns and cities maintained small-scale community theatres in which local, often amateur, actors performed for smaller audiences in relatively low-budget productions.
As the film industry gradually eclipsed live theatre as the dominant form of performing arts in the United States and Europe, the number of local theatres declined sharply. However, public and community theatre companies endure and continue to perform in cities and towns around the world. In the twenty-first century, thousands of theatrical companies in the United States operate annually, producing a variety of productions, from classical works by Shakespeare, Henry Ibsen, and Anton Chekhov, to modern plays by emerging playwrights (Source: EBSCO, 2022).