A theater, or playhouse, is a structure where theatrical works, performing arts, and musical concerts are presented. The theater building serves to define the performance and audience spaces. The facility usually is organized to provide support areas for performers, the technical crew and the audience members, as well as the stage where the performance takes place.
The interior of the Palais Garnier, an opera house, showing the stage and auditorium, the latter including the floor seats and the opera boxes above
An opera production of Ihitai 'Avei'a – Star Navigator at a 'block box' events centre in Auckland, New Zealand
Backstage area of the Vienna State Opera
Maryland Theatre in Hagerstown, Maryland, showing the stage, proscenium and seating
Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers, usually actors or actresses, to present the experience 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", as derived from the Ancient Greek θέατρον, itself from θεάομαι.
Greek theatre of Taormina, Sicily, Italy
A depiction of actors playing the roles of a master (right) and his slave (left) in a Greek phlyax play, c. 350/340 BCE
Roman mosaic depicting actors and an aulos player (House of the Tragic Poet, Pompeii).
Rakshasa or the demon as depicted in Yakshagana, a form of musical dance-drama from India
