The Dionysus festival was once a year, so the theater in Athens was a yearly thing. There's not a lot of evidence one way or the other for drama in other city states. Keep in mind that the Greek play writes also wrote "Goat Songs," raunchy things performed by men with strap on penises. This was not the high art were are often lead to imagine because most of the surviving stuff was more high art
The Romans had drama, poetry, music, and art too. For an idea of what their light drama was like, rent A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which is an excellent pastiche of Plautus, who himself was doing pastiche of Greek new comedy.
Greeks were into naked bare-knuckle boxing bouts where people were maimed and killed. Greeks liked their athletics and weren't gentle about it.
The Goat Songs came before the more serious plays. Athens instituted the drama at the Dionysian festival to cut down on rioting and rapine in the streets during festival times. What better way to honor the God who arrives bringing wine and madness than with bawdy plays featuring slap stick and sexual humor. It was a way to channel lusts into something safer. Classical Greek drama as we know it came from that as opposed to degenerated into it. Later more serious plays were added, so one got three serious plays and a gost song by each playwright at a festival.
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A Touch of History
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Then one day, one person stepped away from the Chorus and *gasp* addressed the others, who then responded (again, in unison). It was the first instance of a dialog. Soon characters developed, stock at first (the Scholar, the Youth, things like that). The next thing anyone knew, stories were being written by playwrights, and an amphitheatre was being built to house the new plays.
But it all started when that first Chorus member stepped out and did something different from the others. Granted, this was taught to me by a professor of creative writing in college, not a Classical studies professor. He was trying to illustrate the importance of dialog in a story -- dialog drives drama. Let characters speak in their own voices, and it's much more dramatic than a dry narration of the events. So he could have made the whole thing about Greek drama up just to support his point.
However, a Classical studies professor did confirm that comedies were performed by men wearing large, red leather phalli strapped to them. So here we are, studying the plays of Aristophanes as 'high literature', but trying to picture the characters with big red strap-ons. Gave us a whole new perspective on things.
She also handed out a copy of a simply hilarious play snippet written by a student long ago. I wish I could find it, but it was lost in one of my various moves. It was written in English, of course, but in the Greek dramatic style. All the violence (and there was a lot) took place off stage, but was dutifully reported to those on stage. At one point, a woman is being stabbed in the head (ouch!), and you can hear her calling out each time, and the Chorus is responding. The only line I remember is when the woman screams that she's been stabbed a third time, and the Chorus says something like, "If that be true, your health is poor, but your math is accurate." We were rolling around with laughter reading it.