Greek Theatre
Aristophanes’ Lysistrata
Greek Theatre Conventions,
Audience, Architecture
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
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
Greek Theatre Architecture
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
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
Masks have not
survived; they were
made of wood, plaster,
linen. These are terra
cotta models.
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, gov’t 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)