the shape of the theatre" (25).
At the Dionysiac rites, which started in the predawn light, choral dancers naturally formed a circle around the altar stone. This became the circular orchestra or chorus area of Greek theatre. Around the orchestra . . . the audience sat in a semicircle on three sides (Mielziner 25).
Dionysiac veneration took place at an altar, or thymele, a stone erected in the center orchestra (Gassner 4f). The thymele survived its more ancient purpose in Greek drama as the position for the chorus to assemble and the coryphaeus to speak (Haigh 80; Schlegel). According to Schlegel, because the proskenion represented the front of a house, not the street, the thymele stood for a place where sacrifices could be offered to household gods (Schlegel). The scale of the theatre (seating 17,000 at Athens) also had religious resonance; Schlegel cites the "majesty of the dramas . . . which required to be seen at a respectful distance" (Schlegel).
The layout of the theatre on the Acropolis in Athens shows that, as Gassner says (4), the chorus marched in from the paradoi, between the audience seats and the orchestra area. They remained in the orchestra throughout a play, for the most part alternating their turns with the scenes but sometimes, depending on the play, interacting directly with the actors. Choral odes that had begun as worshipful practice evolved and secularized into indices of dramatic action, with every next scene "ushered in and followed by a chorus" (Gassner 6).
Out of the demands and conventions of religious ritual grew the conventions of performance. Actors (the named characters) performed both in the orchestra and in an area behind it known as the proskenion, so called because it was in front of the skene, which was a long, rectangular, single-story building running tangentially across the orchestra and facing the auditorium. Actors may have entered the action from one of three big doors of the skene, ...