THE HOOD

“The Hood”

Thanasis Triaridis’ play The Hood is a dystopian future drama, a powerful punch to the stomach, written with humor, bitter irony, and absurdity.

As the author himself writes in the prologue to his book:
“So what of it? There are lakes of blood for a thousand reasons… The important thing is that we ourselves do not press the button that kills.”

A woman goes to a Distribution Station that hands out hoods and asks the clerk for one—so she can use it, as the Emergency Decree requires, at the Defense Assemblies. In these Assemblies, all adult citizens of the country are obliged to ritually murder detained migrants—by pressing a button that activates a hammer which crushes their heads. Then comes a second woman—identical in appearance to the first, but entirely different in manner and in the personal story she carries. And then a third, a fourth, a fifth, and so on. In total, ten women appear—identical in form, yet utterly different in every other way. The saleswoman suspects that it is always the same woman, sent repeatedly by the State to test her. In the end, everyone leaves the Station with the hood they desired.

Directorial Note

Thanasis Triaridis’ The Hood is undeniably a socio-political play that confronts issues concerning life itself, human values, and the freedom of will. In a regimented authoritarian state that hides brazenly beneath the hood of democracy, in a not-so-distant future, society and its pressing problems unfold. The play’s characters must obey absolutely the command of the organized State. But where does that lead? To the murder of the most precious thing a human has: memory. Without memory, consciousness is lost, all emotion is lost, and the human being functions mechanically, pressing—effortlessly and shamelessly, hooded—the button of annihilation. The annihilation of human by human.

In Western society, the act of hooding is emblematic of the social and political alienation produced by the sole surviving socio-economic system: capitalism. The surplus value of capitalism, its alienation, contains within it the suffocation of the human species. Its triumph is that this suffocation occurs almost painlessly—through a symbolic hood. The hood is the suffocation of our social life. And this suffocation, paradoxically and strikingly, produces an absolute pleasure: the pleasure of chaos.

The Direction

The direction follows the line of German Expressionism, with elements of interwar cabaret, focusing on the body and the grotesque expressions of the face, where the delivery of speech is driven by them. On the stage, the performers—a woman and a man, here (by directorial license) embodied as a non-binary person—search for the truth that has been lost, just as their memory has been lost. Their duty is to awaken the spectator and to transmit to them all the emotions and situations that arise, making the spectator a participant and accountable for what takes place on stage but, in essence, within society itself and life itself.

The stage setting of the play (again, by directorial license) is a human being—an actor-musician—used as a living stage-object. On them, the performers sit, flirt, quarrel, comment. This human stage, at times silent, at times expressing itself through sounds and live music it produces on stage, always under the prompting and command of its master, symbolizes the human as object: the human without essence, the human as slave, the migrant human, the pet human, utterly humiliated in an inhuman world.

The direction exploits the peculiar humor of the play, thereby underscoring even more intensely its harsh and dramatic substance. At the back of the stage stands a visual artwork inspired by the play, evoking the sense of a futuristic environment in which the story unfolds.

The costumes follow a retro-futuristic line.
The lighting intensifies the drama of the scenes, focusing mainly on the faces and choreographed movements of the performers.