Theater
From Wikipedia, a free encyclopedia written in simple English for easy reading.
Theater (in American English) , or theatre (in British English) has several meanings.
In American English, it usually means a place where movies are shown. (This is called a cinema in British English). In British English, theatre means a place where live plays are performed. (This is called a stage theater in America).
Theater or Theatre can also mean the business of putting on plays. An actor might say "I am in the theatre business," or a writer might say "I write for the theatre," meaning that they write plays, rather than movies or TV shows.
The first people to perform plays were the Ancient Greeks. Some famous writers from them include Aristophanes and Sophocles. They divided plays into two kinds: comedies, which are funny, and where the good characters usually end up happier than they were, and tragedies, which were usually sad, and where the good characters suffer or end up worse than they were. Plays are still often divided into these two types today.
In the Middle Ages, the Christian church began to use theater as a way of telling the stories from the Bible to people who did not know how to read. They wrote Mystery Plays, where each part of the Bible story would be a play put on by a different group of people. In the sixteenth century, there were groups of actors who would tour around the country performing plays for entertainment. These plays were called Commedia dell'arte, and different stories would be created around the same group of characters. Often the spoken lines would be made up by the actors for each performance.
At the end of the sixteenth century, the travelling actors began to perform in fixed theatre buildings. They also began to have writers write down their lines, instead of making them up. This was the period when William Shakespeare wrote. At that time, in England, women were not allowed to perform, so male actors would play female characters.
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