The traditional theaters of Asia originated out of religious ceremonies and ideas. Most are highly theatrical and stylized and fuse acting, mime, dance, music, and text. The development of Asian theater will become more apparent when we examine the three great traditions of Indian, Chinese, and Japanese culture.

In India, theater took the form of Sanskrit drama, which flourished for several hundred years from the fourth through the tenth centuries, C.E. In China, a highly sophisticated drama emerged during the Tang period, from the seventh through the tenth centuries; a more popular theater developed in the Yuan period of the late thirteenth to the late fourteenth century; and a literary, artificial theater took hold in the Ming dynasty from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries.

In Japan, theater reached its high points first with the stylized nō drama in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In the seventeenth century, two new forms emerged: bunraku (puppet theater) and the popular kabuki. Although the production approach to plays in India and China has been lost, in Japan all three traditional forms—nō, bunraku, and kabuki—have been preserved and are still performed today.

When we turn to the Middle Ages, we will have traveled half a world away from Asian theater. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, there was an interchange between the stylized, symbolic theaters of Asia and the more realistic theater of the West, with each exerting a strong influence on the other.

During Medieval times, theater was reborn in the Roman Catholic church, where musical and dramatic sections were added to religious services and evolved into plays dramatizing biblical events. Mystery, or cycle, plays, which depicted a series of biblical tales, were staged and acted outdoors by amateurs. Another medieval dramatic form was the morality play, which was staged by professional performers and presented allegorical characters and moral lessons.