This volume combines an introduction to the concept of theater with three detailed and critical introductions to the three most prevalent theories of theater analysis today: semiotics, anthropology, and the phenomenological method.

These are three organized complementary approaches, none of which can solve the problem by itself, and neither can all three together analyze the complex phenomenon known as theater in a thorough way. They are necessarily complementary because, as it turns out, each one alone carries undesirable risks of one-sidedness: semiotics can reduce theater to a means of transmitting information or, at best, to a type of communication resembling a correspondence; anthropology, while starting with the question of the origin of theater, might perceive the art of performance as just one representational act among many others (such as soccer matches, electoral campaigns, all kinds of events) - both methodologies brutally overlook the aesthetic of Dionysian art - and phenomenology, with its insistence on experience and the substantialization of the performance as a self-sufficient event, which alone creates actors and spectators, becomes something like the metaphysics of theater.

Nevertheless, the fragmentary results of these methodologies, even in their combined application, do not completely unravel the mysteries of the complexity of theatrical art, which is not surprising. The same occurs in a similar way with other complex phenomena of human culture, although in theater this complexity is particularly evident because the performing art recreates an entire world with the very mechanisms of society and the means of human culture.

Experiences are complex and not easily analyzed; yet they constitute our consciousness. It is like the experience of beauty: beauty cannot be analyzed; however, its inexplicability does not prevent us from enjoying it. Similarly, theater, despite so many theoretical efforts, seems destined to remain shrouded in its mystery to attract us again and again with its endless variations and forms, drawing us into a living experience that has one characteristic: no matter what you do and how you react, it does not leave you indifferent.