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Inviting to go beyond the traditional distinction between mimesis and diegesis, this paper proposes to consider how theater, as an activity of fictional representation of sequences of actions, can be understood in a relevant way according to the category of gift. What is played and given in the theatrical game? This game, like the exchange rituals of traditional societies, is a serious game. It implies in its arrangement and by the effect of the performance, a pact of recognition between actors and spectators. It belongs to a process of relations at the same time empathic and distanced. And it is insofar as each one, in this ludic distance, plays the game that affects can circulate between the stage and the room and that the fiction can exert its catch on the life.