The next reason masks were worn is that each play had many roles or parts and few actors to play all of those parts. The shortage of actor might be due to the enormous talent that was required of a person to perform on such a stage. What this meant was that each role had a different mask, but not always a different character playing each of the parts. According to some accounts, "at first there was only one actor, but by the time of the earliest surviving tragedy, there were two, and before the death of Aeschylus, three." (Brown, pg. 17-18)

The number seemed to stick at three, for comedy and tragedy alike, with these actors sharing all the roles between themselves. A possible reason for this is that in such an enormous venue, as most Greek Theatres were, the space in which the actors play in is sometimes very far away. The number three stuck because it made it easier for the audience to see who was actually speaking. This was accomplished through dramatic gesturing and staging which emphasized focus on who was speaking.

To put it simply, the mask allowed the few actors great freedom. By simply putting on a mask and altering one's voice an actor could "indicate immediately whether the character was god, goddess, king, queen, prophet, messenger, old hag, nurse, shepherd or slave." (Kernodle, pg 128) This was particularly helpful in portraying women on stage or any other character which might seem foreign to the all male casts. This leads us into our next topic in why masks were worn in Greek Theatre: