Daily Dose of English 45
Theater
Daily Dose of English 45
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today, because in this episode, we're talking about theater, or theater, or theater. However you want to say it, there's a lot of different pronunciations because it's kind of a funny word in how it's pronounced. But I don't really want to go into the pronunciation too much of the word theater, and I rather want to talk about what it is. At first glance, a theater is the building where there's plays and things like that. So there's a stage on which is often which is like inside the theater itself. There's different parts to the theater. There's where the audience sits, the auditorium, I think it's called. I don't know. There's different levels to the theater as well. So people can sit up higher or lower. There's the pit, which is where the orchestra plays. So the orchestra is who makes the music for the show or whatever's happening in the theater. And they play in the pit, which is typically right in front of the stage. There's backstage, which is where the actors can't be seen or whatever's happening backstage. There's things like the green room. The green room is where actors go to kind of just be before they're on, after, whatever it might be. There are the dressing rooms where you go to get your costume and to put on makeup and to get changed. Um, there's the, um, entrance and the ticketing booths that where you enter the theater and you have to pay, pay for your tickets or pick up your tickets or whatever. Lots of different parts to a theater, right? There's going to be some bathrooms. There's going to be a lot of different parts to it. But that is just the building itself. Those are interesting and historic and cool, but I want to talk a bit more about theater and the more abstract idea of acting on stage and going to the theater. Because that's something that I think is really a great form of art, if that makes sense. because theater is an art, obviously. It is a way, it is a form of acting and music and writing all put together to create a live piece of entertainment. And theater is very, very old. It has been done since before the Greeks and the Romans and the thousands of years ago. We don't really even know what we can even call theater as starting because humans have told stories and put on costumes and danced around and sung songs to transmit these messages and ideas for ever, basically. It's a part of being human. It's almost as ingrained to us as language is. Language and culture and theater, in a lot of ways, are tied together. And so I think theater is a very important art form that is not as popular nowadays as it used to be, but it is still very supported and it is still popular because a lot of people do love live theater. And I would include myself in that because, like I said, I think theater is very interesting, sort of from a human perspective, but it's also really fun. There's something very different about going into a building to see actors on stage perform a play than to watch even the same thing on TV. Movies and TV shows, I obviously, I also like, I've talked about those before in this podcast, but I think theater is a different, just a whole different thing. And it's something that will always have a place in my heart. That's a phrase that we use to talk about something that is important to somebody, even if they don't necessarily do it all the time. Right? So for example, you can say somebody will always have a place in your heart, even though you don't see them anymore. Or if something that you don't do as often, like go to the theater, but you still love it, it can still have a place in your heart. I've gone to a lot of plays in my life, thankfully. I'm very lucky to be able to have seen so many plays. And a lot of those were when I was pretty young, because my parents also thought it was important to enjoy the theater. And because in my hometown, there was a children's theater that specialized in family plays, right? Plays that were fun for the whole family to go see. Obviously, anybody can go. Actually, that's not obvious. I guess it's called the children's theater, but anybody could go, right? You can go if you want, if you're there. But it was specifically had families in mind. So they did fun plays that were geared towards children, right? So I saw plays like The Cat in the Hat. What else? The Jack and the Beanstalk. Oh, and that's called Into the Woods, I believe. Yeah, I think that's right. a lot of plays that have kids in mind for the most part, but then also are for parents to enjoy. And I saw lots of those. We had season tickets to go see the whatever four or five different plays every single year for many years. And I thought it was a really, really fun experience that I really remember fondly. I also have gotten to see plays in my adulthood that are in, for example, on Broadway in New York. I've been able to see plays in London. So I'm very lucky to be have been able to see so many wonderful plays, including some very, very good ones and some not so good. I've also studied theater as well and learned about plays and the sort of more history and about theater as an art form in that sort of sense, as an actor, because it's something that I find really interesting. I started doing theater in, which is how we say that acting on stage and being a part of productions in high school. It's a relatively common thing for people to do in high school because you don't have to be a professional, right? You just have to kind of want to, and you can be a part of the theater, which is fantastic. Um, and I started in high school, I believe in my sophomore year, which is my second year of high school. Um, or maybe my, my freshman year. I'm actually not really sure. I don't remember. Um, but that freshman year is the first year, by the way, the first year of high school or the second year of high school, which is called freshman and sophomore year. Um, junior year is the third year. And then senior year is the fourth year. I don't know why we have names like that, but we do. And those are the same names that we use for university as well. Anyways, I started doing a theater in high school and I really enjoyed it. It was something that I was pretty good at and that I just liked doing and having fun and I made a lot of friends that way. then I went on to study it a bit more and I never did it professionally so I've never been on a stage and gotten paid to do that but I have studied it and do really enjoy it and maybe at some point in my life I will go back into the theater and try to do things on stage for like a profession probably not full-time because that's a difficult thing to do as an actor is To be a full-time stage actor is very difficult because it's so demanding, but then also really, what's the word for competitive? That's the word. When there's a lot of people who want to do something, it's a very competitive thing to do. So being an actor in general is very competitive because there's hundreds of thousands of people who really, really want to be actors. What was I saying? Oh yeah, studying theater. And when I was studying theater, I learned a lot more about, like I said, the history and how to do things better. And also I learned more about why I like it. Because theater is very different from film, not only in how it looks, because you're literally on stage and you're in the room, but also in the way that you act, right? Acting for theater, is much bigger right because one you need to people need to see you from all the way across the theater right if they're up a hundred feet away from you right they have to be able to see you but on tv you're just on the screen another thing so that you have to sort of be bigger with your actions with your emotions with your movements and then also with your voice, right? My voice is fairly loud. I don't know if you can actually tell over the microphone because of how I edit the audio, but I speak quite loudly and that's a way that I like to kind of generally sound, but that does not work on film because you're supposed to be more subtle and more real because the camera can see everything. so there's a lot of differences between theater and film which some people don't like right some people don't like theater because it doesn't look real it looks weird it looks fake and so um but i think it's really beautiful in a lot of ways like that different style of acting can really be touching and moving in different ways than film can be. Because with TV, you can do things that are impossible, right? You can edit things, you can do animation. But on stage, everything has to obey the laws of physics. And yet, people do amazing things on the stage. And so I've talked enough about this for this episode because we're kind of hitting time, but I want to end by recommending that if you can, go see live theater, especially if you can do it in English and enjoy it, if you have the opportunity, but in whatever language. Go to live theater if you haven't before and see what you can appreciate with the differences between live theater and movie or TV shows. And I wonder what you notice. Let me know down in the comments what you think about live theater and theater in general, and I would love to read what you think. But I'll see you again tomorrow for another episode. Bye.
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