With tools from theater and theater anthropology and in continuous dialogue with Freud, Yorgos Andreadis takes a journey where yesterday and today coexist at every moment, as theater comes to life thanks to the shadows that become roles to illuminate the past, present, and future.

From Aeschylus to Brecht. A journey that started from ancient Thespis, the first actor, and continues still, with no one guaranteeing us how and for how long. The book, in its two parts, follows this fascinating journey through:
- Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, who give birth to texts ready to become breath, body, theatrical magic, establishing on stage the dialogue between man and the city, the gods, myth, and ritual.
- Aristophanes, who creates magical utopian cities in front of our eyes, which last only as long as the magic of a performance, that is, almost forever.
- And the ancient puppet, the margin and center of the ancient world, which organizes its own theme, with a god as its first director.

But the Greeks are not the only source of theater.
- In India, Bhasa transforms theatrically, like our own tragedians, the great epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.
- Shakespeare and the other Elizabethans start from the medieval mysteries to create a theater that meets the ancient drama on its own original path.
- Sigismund, the imprisoned prince of Calderon, converses with Hamlet, designing the boundaries of our own prison.
- Moliere creates works like Don Juan, where the comic and the tragic intertwine, prophesying the theater of the absurd.
- The new Greek playwrights search for the way to lift the "great stones," and
- The humble Karagiozis reaches peaks that make him a co-ruler with Aristophanes and a conversationalist with Brecht.
- Brecht, who launches an exemplary modern and at the same time classical attack against the classical,
- while in the place of the conclusion, we hear Artaud, in his famous lecture at the Vieux Colombier, prophesying the death and resurrection of theater.