Greek Theatre

1
Greek Theatre

• Aristophanes Lysistrata
• Greek Theatre Conventions, Audience, Architecture

2
Lysistrata 411 BCE

• The pact Athens, allies, foes
• Also seize the treasury
• Two choruses old men and old women who bicker at
  the gates of the Acropolis
• Comic styles situational comedy, farce, satire

3
Performances at Festivals

• Athens had 4 festivals winter-spring
• City Dionysia, late March contests among tribes
  and individuals drama is biggest
• Lenaea late Jan, more comedies
• Archon grants a chorus to writers and appoints
  choregus to fund writers
• Writers create scripts, rehearse chorus and
  principles, act
• 2 days dithyramb choruses, 3 days tragedies, 1
  day comedies (from 486 BCE)
• Competition among choregus, writers, actors

4
Greek Theatre Architecture
5
Theatre Structures

• Orchestra circle to 1/2 circle
• Amphitheatre wood to stone, up to 14,000
• Skene wood to stone only doors and steps
• Proskenion
• Parodos (left vs. right, chorus entrance and
  exit)
• Thymele (altar, usually used)
• Deus ex machina and Ekkyklema
• Periaktoi not til Hellenistic era first painted
  and changing scenery

6
(No Transcript)
7
Actors and Costumes

• Possession by role like possession by gods or
  like inebriated state link to Dionysus
• All men women are not citizens and not on stage
• Protagonist, 2nd and 3rd actors change costume
  and mask for character changes
• Dwarfed by surroundings
• Short chitons on men, long on women
• Masks, cothurnoi, comedy uses phallus

8
Masks have not survived they were made of
wood, plaster, linen. These are terra cotta
models.
9
Influence of Greek Drama

• 4th Century Hellenistic Age, then Athens falls by
  338 BCE
• Cultural influence spreads to Egypt, the Middle
  East, and Rome.
• Extant Greek texts (plays, govt records) and
  other Greek artifacts (figures, vase paintings)
  come to us mostly from Rome.
• Much has been lost Aristophanes we have 11
  plays out of at least 40 (titles survive). Music?
  Dance? When did painted scenery arrive (periaktoi)