What does Theater have to offer?

As Marvin Carlson makes clear, theater artists are not different from artists of other kinds 

'To be or not to be...' Shakespeare makes the existential question beg

Here  the idea of thinking of a word not as an expression of an] idea but as action, a

 performative utterance... one that aims at achieving some state of affairs in the world rather than reporting whether the state of affairs obtains. and such an utterance could fail due to certain “infelicities” of circumstance of speaker, listener, or environment, understand constituting acts not only as constituting the identity of the actor, but as constituting that identity as a compelling illusion, an object of belief.

Interestingly both Austin and Searle thought that the utterances of actors, because actors were merely pretending to do things (see §2.2), were not genuinely performative utterances.

1. When it comes to narrowing down to the ontology (reality) of theater there are more specific questions that make any approach to the ontology of theater more difficult. The first question concerns how we determine what one must say there is within the discourse of theater. On the common view outlined above, the most basic ontological question is “What do we (have to) say there is?” with respect to some domain of discourse (Quine 1948). On the Quinean view one should first determine what the best empirical theory is in some field of inquiry, second regiment that theory in terms of some system of formal logic, and then, thirdly, ask what objects satisfy the existentially quantified variables within that regimented discourse..