 Philosophy of theater, like much else in aesthetics and philosophy of art, is wide in its scope and makes contact with many other disciplines within philosophy and outside of it. This entry should help make that clear. The first section of this entry will provide background information and describe an important normative issue derived from certain metaphysical and epistemic positions. The next three sections sort the issues in a way familiar among analytic philosophers in aesthetics and philosophy of art, according to whether the issues concern a) descriptions of instances of the art form, b) understanding (and interpretation) of instances of the form, and c) evaluations of such instances. However, some elements of theater not discussed in this entry are otherwise interesting in their own right, for example: the relationship between theater and music (and the special case of musical theater); the relationship between theater and dance (as a related but historically distinct kind of performance); the relationship between theater and architecture (which yields a focus upon scenography); the relation between acting and portraiture (people describe acting as “portraying a character”); the relationship between narratives in theater and narratives in video games (and questions about immersion and interactivity); the relationship between acting and story-telling; the relationship between theater and narratology (and the distinction between narrative and non-narrative theater); the relationship between theater with live human actors and theater with puppets; and so on.