In 50 videos, Mike Rugnetta teaches you theater and drama! This course is based on an introductory college level course in Theater and explores the...

Welcome to Crash Course Theater with Mike Rugnetta! In this, our inaugural week, we're going to ask the two classic questions about theater. 1.What...

This week on Crash Course Theater, Mike is acting like theater started in Greece. Well, for the western theater, this is true. The earliest recorded...

Aristotle. He knows a lot, right? And if you choose to believe Aristotle, then you must believe all the mechanics of tragedy that Mike is about to...

Get ready for hilarity, because this week, we're diving head first into Greek Comedy. Actually, though, maybe don't get TOO ready for hilarity. Taste...

Today, Mike Rugnetta takes you from our beginnings in ancient Greek theater, and moves on to the development of Roman theater. Which, it turns out,...

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...

Ancient Sanskrit theater is one of the oldest theater traditions, and thanks to Bharata Muni and his treatise on theater, the Natyashastra, we can...

As the Roman Empire fell, so did the theater. If there's anyone who hates theater and actors more than Romans, it's early Christians. As Christianity...

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...

Not long after drama reappeared in the unlikely home of European churches, the church decided again it didn't like theater. And so, the budding...

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...

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...

The Renaissance came to England late, thanks to a Hundred Years War that ran long and lasted 116 years, and then a civil war to decide who would be...

This is the story of how a young Englishman named William Shakespeare stormed London's theater scene in the late 16th century, and wrote a bunch of...

Shakespeare's tragedies...were tragic. But they had some jokes. They also changed the way tragedies were written. Characters like Hamlet, Macbeth,...

This week we're continuing our discussion of William Shakespeare and looking at his comedies and romances. As well as something called problem plays....

This week on Crash Course Theater, Shakespeare is dead. Long live Shakespeare. Well, long live English theater, anyway. Actually, it's about to get...

The English Theater survived a lot of pushback from various powers that be, but in the 17th century, it had to go into hiding, from PURITANS. Let's...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

This week, we're headed back to India to learn about the all night dance shows that culminate in killing a Demon (metaphorically): Kathakali! This...

This week we're headed to China to learn about the ancient origins of theater there. We'll look at the early days of wizard theater (not a typo), the...

This week, we're headed back to England to learn about Sentimental Comedies. They weren't that funny, but they were definitely sentimental. The...

Theater had a slow start in Germany, mainly because Germany wasn't really a thing until relatively recent times. After Germany finally became a...

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...

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...

We’re continuing our discussion of nineteenth-century American theater with a look at some upsetting parts of the US's theatrical past. In the...

This week, we're back in Europe to learn about Realism and Naturalism. In the 19th Century, playwrights like Eugene Scribe, Alexandre de Dumas Fils,...

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...

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...

Get ready for Russian modernism. Mike is teaching you about the playwrighting of Catherine the Great, Anton Chekhov's plays, the Moscow Art Theater,...

Prepare to be horrified, and to look into the face of inhumanity with the Grand Guignol. Mike Rugnetta teaches you about one of theater history's...

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....

Watch. Dime. Develop. Powder. Pantry. Dirt. That's right, it's time for a dip into the random, because we're talking about the Dada theater that grew...

Join us here, in the darkness. Our theater journey takes us into the heart of expressionism today, as playwrights in the late 19th and early 20th...

It's time to go Back...to the Future. By which I mean, we're going back into the past to talk about Futurism. Which seems like it would be cool, but...

In the early 20th century United States, big melodramatic productions were on Broadway, and everywhere across the country. Which inevitably led to an...

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....

The 1930s in the United States were pretty bad for employment in all industries, and the theater was no exception. As part of Roosevelt's New Deal,...

I don't mean it mean, but today we're going to be cruel. It's the fun-loving Theater of Cruelty, which was pioneered by the genius Antonin Artaud in...

Are you ready to learn something about the world? Then you're ready for Bertolt Brecht, and his ideas about Epic Theater. Brecht wanted to lean into...

Get ready to get weird. Mike Rugnetta teaches you about the Theater of the Absurd, a 1950s theatrical reaction to the dire world events of the 1940s....

We're going to Broadway, everybody, and it's not going to be that fun. In fact, it's going to be a very serious experience with lots of powerful...

By the middle of the 20th century, the epicenter of American theater, the Broadway theater district in New York, was getting to be a pretty staid and...

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...

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...

This is it! We're going out with a singing, dancing look at the Broadway Book Musical. Oklahoma! On the Town! Annie Get Your Gun! Also, just Annie!...

Follow a new generation of the Dutton family during the early twentieth century when pandemics, historic drought, the end of Prohibition and the...

Jack Reacher, a veteran military police investigator, has just recently entered civilian life. Reacher is a drifter, carrying no phone and the barest...

Ted Black, a former federal prosecutor from New York, has reinvented himself representing the most powerful clients in Los Angeles. But his firm is...

Years ago, the fearsome Pirate King, Gol D. Roger was executed leaving a huge pile of treasure and the famous "One Piece" behind. Whoever claims the...

A former U.S. President is called out of retirement to find the source of a deadly cyberattack, only to discover a vast web of lies and conspiracies.

The tranquility in a serene, wealthy community inhabited by some of the world's most prominent individuals explodes when a shocking murder occurs and...

Mark leads a team of office workers whose memories have been surgically divided between their work and personal lives. When a mysterious colleague...

Jae-yoon, a late military enlistee, and his girlfriend, Young-joo, break up over the phone over growing misunderstandings. But a zombie outbreak...

Matt Murdock, a blind lawyer with heightened abilities, is fighting for justice through his bustling law firm, while former mob boss Wilson Fisk...

Peter Parker is on his way to becoming a hero, but his path to get there is anything but ordinary.

In a land where no magic is present. A land where the strong make the rules and weak have to obey. A land filled with alluring treasures and beauty,...

A group of friends have customized their microwave so that it can send text messages to the past. As they perform different experiments, an...