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Portal:Theatre

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The Theatre Portal

Ancient Greece theatre in Taormina, Sicily, Italy

Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers, usually actors to present experiences of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music, and dance. It is the oldest form of drama, though live theatre has now been joined by modern recorded forms. Elements of art, such as painted scenery and stagecraft such as lighting are used to enhance the physicality, presence and immediacy of the experience. Places, normally buildings, where performances regularly take place are also called "theatres" (or "theaters"), as derived from the Ancient Greek θέατρον (théatron, "a place for viewing"), itself from θεάομαι (theáomai, "to see", "to watch", "to observe").

A theatre company is an organisation that produces theatrical performances, as distinct from a theatre troupe (or acting company), which is a group of theatrical performers working together. (Full article...)

Featured article

Helen Craig
The Unconquered is a three-act play written by Russian-American author Ayn Rand as an adaptation of her 1936 novel We the Living. Producer George Abbott staged the play on Broadway in February 1940, featuring Helen Craig (pictured) as Kira Argounova, a young woman living in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Her lover Leo Kovalensky develops tuberculosis. To get money for his treatment, Kira has an affair with a Communist official, Andrei Taganov. After Leo recovers from his illness, he becomes involved with black market food sales that Andrei is investigating. When Andrei realizes that Kira loves Leo, he helps his rival avoid prosecution, then commits suicide. Leo leaves Kira, who decides to risk her life escaping the country. The production was troubled by problems with the script and the cast. When the play opened at the Biltmore Theatre, it was a critical and financial failure, and closed in less than a week. It was the last of Rand's plays produced during her lifetime.

In this month

Chikamatsu Monzaemon

Pinter in 2005
Harold Pinter (1930–2008) was a Nobel Prize-winning English playwright and screenwriter, with a career that spanned more than 50 years. His plays include The Birthday Party, The Homecoming and Betrayal, and his screenplays include The Servant, The French Lieutenant's Woman and Sleuth. Pinter appeared as an actor in productions of his own work on radio and film. He also undertook roles in works by other writers. He directed nearly 50 productions for stage, theatre and screen. He was born and raised in Hackney, east London, trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and the Central School of Speech and Drama, and worked in repertory theatre before achieving success as a writer. In his later years, he was known for his political activism and his opposition to the war in Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq. Pinter's last stage performance was as Krapp in Beckett's play Krapp's Last Tape, for the Royal Court Theatre, in 2006.
  • ... that the studios of a California TV station were converted back into a movie theater after it went out of business?
  • ... that when part of New York City's Hotel Riverview became a theater, some people thought that the hotel's overflowing toilets and leaky ceilings were part of the show there?
  • ... that Edward Hopper's 1963 painting Intermission can be viewed as a metaphor for the world as theater?
  • ... that there were at least seven unsuccessful attempts to redevelop New York City's Kings Theatre before it reopened in 2015?
  • ... that during their two-minute performance at the Oulu City Theatre, the group Jumalan teatteri caused a huge scandal by throwing excrement, eggs and yoghurt at the audience?
  • ... that actor George Kunkel portrayed in blackface the character of Uncle Tom, using it at first to promote slavery during the American Civil War but later to attack it, after his views had changed?

Selected quote

Spencer Tracy
Know your lines and don't bump into the furniture.

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