In the 1920s, there was a blossoming of all kinds of art made by African Americans in the New York neighborhood Harlem. Let's call it a renaissance. While all the arts were having a great run, some extremely interesting things were happening in the theater. Writers like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston were writing plays, and black theater companies were drawing larger audiences than ever before.

When last we saw Theater, it was just making its way back in the West, by sneaking a little drama into the Easter mass. In today's episode, we're talking about Hrotsvitha, the cool 10th century nun from Lower Saxony who was maybe the first playwright of the new era of theater. She wrote comedies with a moral message, and influenced future heavy hitters like Hildegard of Bingen.

It's difficult to talk about African theater thanks to colonialism. Pre-colonial Africa was home to many spoken languages, and not nearly as many written languages. The chain of oral tradition was broken by colonial policies, and so many pre-colonial traditions are lost. Today, we're going to talk about some of the dance and theater traditions of Africa, and look at post-colonial theater across the continent.

We're headed back to Japan, this time in the Edo period to follow up on Noh theater, which had gone out of style last time we checked in. Now, under the Shoguns, there's couple of really interesting types of drama on the scene. Kabuki is a sort of successor to Noh, with wilder stories and more action. And Bunraku is straight up high intensity puppet theater. Mike tells you all about how the Samurais got themselves into trouble watching bawdy theater shows in Edo.

This week on Crash Course Theater, Mike is taking you to Japan to have a look at Noh theater. Noh, and its counterpart Kyogen are some of the most revered theater forms in Japan, and are still performed today. Today you'll learn how Noh grew out of traditional Shinto dances, what a Noh theater looks like, and how audiences managed to sit through 8 hour performance in the days before memory foam theater seats. (hint: it was the Kyogen)

In the early 20th century United States, big melodramatic productions were on Broadway, and everywhere across the country. Which inevitably led to an Avant-Garde backlash. An interesting part of the backlash was Little Theater, a movement that embraced smaller, more emotional, and less profitable forms of drama. One of Little Theater's most notable practitioners, Eugene O'Neill changed the theatrical landscape with groundbreaking plays like The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey into Night.

This week on CC Theater, Mike Rugnetta teaches you about the greatest playwright of Renaissance France, Moliere. We'l talk a bit about early French theater design, and the kingly love of theater that Louis the XIII and XIV shared, and look at Moliere's Tartuffe in the Thought Bubble.

It's lights up in America! This week, we're headed to North America. We'll look at Native American storytelling traditions, the theater that Europeans brought along starting in the 17th century, and how theater developed before and after the American Revolutionary War. Also, a terrible Macbeth rivalry which culminates in a full blown theater riot.

Ancient Sanskrit theater is one of the oldest theater traditions, and thanks to Bharata Muni and his treatise on theater, the Natyashastra, we can tell you quite a bit about it, all the way down to eyebrow and nostril poses. This week you'll learn about the drama of ancient India, and its connection to the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.

This week, we're going to Italy for a Renaissance. The Middle Ages are over, and it's time to talk about the flourishing of art and humanism across Europe. Painting, sculpture, music, architecture, and plays with fart jokes were all thriving between from 1300 - 1500, and we're going to teach you about the theatrical aspects of that flourishing, as it happened in Italy.

Poor Theater and Theater of the Oppressed were two sort of concurrent movements that shared some of the same aims. Jerzy Grotowski's Poor Theater eschewed the use of lighting, props, costumes, makeup, and many of the other trappings of "rich" theater. Augusto Boal's Theater of the Oppressed in Brazil challenged the ideas of how plays were written and performed, and blurred the lines between actors and audiences.

This week, we're headed to the Americas to learn about the theater that existed there prior to the arrival of Europeans, how the theater of the Spanish influenced it, and the impact of Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, playwrighting Spanish nun extraordinaire.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, theater was evolving rapidly in Europe. Impresarios like Georg II, Duke of the Duchy of Saxe Meinengen (in what is now Germany), were pushing theater troupes to new heights of realism. New methods of staging, acting, set building, and even rehearsing were making plays more realistic than ever. These practices spread to France with Andre Antoine's Theatre Realisme, and from there spread across Europe.

At the turn of the 18th century, audience were ready to go over the top, and get some really, really dramatic theater in their lives. Like, a dog dueling a man type of dramatic. In London, only two theaters were licensed, but entertainment entrepreneurs figured out that musical entertainments weren't subject to the same restrictions. So, incidental music was invented, and the melodrama was born. And then switched with another infant. And later tied to train tracks, but rescued at the last minute. And so forth.

In which Mike delves into the theater of ancient Rome. It wasn't all gladiators and Christian-killing, you know. There was theater, too. Roman drama drew heavily on Greek drama. So heavily, in fact, that many of the stories and characters were lifted directly from Greek plays. This time around, you'll learn about Plautus, Terence, and Seneca, and just what they owe to Menander.

Everyone knows, you need a bunch of rules to make good theater. That's what the French thought in the 17th century, anyway. The French Neoclassical revival had a BUNCH of French playwrights following a bunch of rules. Unsurprisingly, some of the most interesting plays of the era broke those rules. Today, we'll talk about the rules, and we'll talk about Racine (who followed them), and Corneille (who was not so much a rules guy).

Shakespeare's tragedies...were tragic. But they had some jokes. They also changed the way tragedies were written. Characters like Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear had tragic outcomes, but they were sympathetic characters in a lot of ways. This was a big change from the way Seneca and the Greeks wrote tragedies, and it caught on.

This week on Crash Course Theater, Mike and Yorick take us to beautiful Spain and look at its Golden Age. Spain was having kind of a moment in the 16th and 17th centuries. They had this big empire, the culture was really flowering, and Humanism was popping up all over, but they also had the inquisition. Into this world came prolific writers like Felix Lope de Vega and Pedro Calderon de la Barca. And they wrote a ton of plays.
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It's a Scandinavian grudge match on Crash Course Theater. We're looking at a couple of the key movements in European theater that deeply influenced the modern theater of today. We'll take a close look at two of the most radical and influential European playwrights of the 19th century, who just happened to be mortal enemies. Henrik Ibsen of Norway, and Swede August Strindberg reshaped theater, between bouts of hating each other.

The Irish Renaissance in the early 20th century included a wealth of new plays written both in Ireland, and by Irish ex-patriots elsewhere. W.B. Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory, and J.M. Synge were creating a new national theater of Ireland at the Abbey Theatre. They often drew their stories from the fabric of Irish life. Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw were meanwhile writing important (and often hilarious) works on the world stage.