Event Category: Theater

The Typists
by Murray Schisgal
directed by Nagia Mitsakou

A masterpiece of American theatre.

For the first time in Greece, the one-act play The Typists by the award-winning American playwright Murray Schisgal will be presented starting April 4, 2026, every Saturday and Sunday.

The typists of the 1960s—with their fears, inhibitions, desires, and dreams—feel almost paradoxically familiar. Typewriters may have been replaced by computers, rotary phones by mobile devices, and mail-order catalogues by online shopping. Yet our needs, fears, desires, and the time that relentlessly pursues us remain unchanged.

Through what appears to be a simple snapshot of everyday life between two typical New Yorkers of his time, Schisgal manages to condense an entire lifetime into a single eight-hour workday. An eight-hour span that transcends the limits of space and time within the play and expands into the very fabric of human experience.

The Typists, one of the most striking one-act plays of modern dramaturgy, was first presented Off-Broadway in 1963, starring Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson, and won the Drama Desk Award. Murray Schisgal became widely known both for his play Luv (1964) and as the screenwriter of the film success Tootsie (1982), starring Dustin Hoffman and Jessica Lange.

About the Play

When Paul Cunningham arrives on his first day at a new job in a mail-order company, he makes it clear to his colleague Sylvia Peyton that his presence there will be temporary. Paul studies law in the evenings and, with an already established lawyer uncle, his future appears promising.

Sylvia, the head of the department, welcomes him warmly. She too has her own dreams—primarily of an emotional nature. A particular relationship begins to develop between the two colleagues, as Paul’s “temporary” stay in the office keeps extending.

Weeks turn into months, months into years, and years into decades. Paul and Sylvia grow older together, sharing small everyday conversations about life outside the office and about the big things that—someday—the future might hold for them. When, now aged, they say their final “goodnight” to their unseen employer, we realize we have witnessed an entire life cycle filled with thwarted desires and unfulfilled dreams. A life seen through humor, sadness, illusions, and compromises that run through human existence.

Paul and Sylvia are potentially free individuals—like all of us. In a tragicomic way, we watch their desires and dreams being suffocated by their own fear. A fear that becomes a chain, restraining, limiting, and ultimately subduing them.

This potentially free human being is none other than each one of us.

Duration: 70 minutes
Suitable for ages: 12+

Three Sisters (better days will come)
by Eirini Lamprinopoulou & Danae-Arsenia Filidou
Directed by: Eirini Lamprinopoulou

Somewhere out there, there is surely something better. Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid of anything.

Three Sisters (better days will come) is a contemporary Greek adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s play of the same name, shedding light—through sharp humor and sensitivity—on the fractures within the Greek family. Prompted by an inheritance issue, questions emerge around memory, loss, and the separation from the first home. What does family mean? How do we deal with unfulfilled dreams? And what is the “Moscow” we continue to seek today?

It’s strange, really—how time passes. On a day like today, exactly a year ago, father died. And now here we are. One year later. In exactly the same house.

Olga, Maria, and Eirini return to Kefalonia one year after their father’s death. Their decision to sell the family home—a space filled with memories, traces of childhood, and familial illusions—brings them back together after eight years, during which each has followed a different life path in Athens. As they wait for prospective buyers, they are forced to coexist in a house that functions as a living archive: old conflicts resurface, unfinished conversations return, and personal choices are once again called into question. Their balance is tested and their certainties collapse, as each of them is compelled to redefine what she has left behind and what she still claims.

The performance is directed and dramaturgically co-signed by Eirini Lamprinopoulou, who, for the first time, also moves into playwriting, continuing her stage research on female identity, power, and the mechanisms of the family as a field of conflict and redefinition.

The performance Three Sisters (better days will come) was presented under the auspices of the Greek Ministry of Culture’s program “All of Greece, One Culture,” at the Castle of Agios Georgios in Kefalonia, leaving a strong impression on audiences.

Duration: 80 minutes (no intermission)
Suitable for ages: 13+

Dulcinea presents “The Death of an Actor,” directed by Anna-Maria Iakovou, a performance inspired by three short stories by Anton Chekhov. Beginning with the famous sneeze of the civil servant Chervyakov in The Death of a Government Clerk, the performance brings Chekhov’s universe into the contemporary reality of the artist, where social devaluation and insecurity often turn into an internalized sense of guilt. Two actors, a musician and a civil servant create a theatrical landscape that moves between theatre and performance, echoing the memory of old travelling theatre troupes, while exploring with irony and tenderness the burden of public exposure and the fragile position of artists in today’s world.

The performance “The Death of an Actor” is presented under the auspices and with the financial
support of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture.

The Trials
by Dawn King
A FONACT production
Directed by Youla Boudali

 Everyone lived like we did… I wasn’t any worse than anyone else.

In a near future State, a group of teenager jurors are gathered to deliver a verdict on the generation above them for crimes against the climate.

Who is really culpable and who must pay the ultimate price?

Dawn King’s searingly relevant play is presented by a young international cast for the first time in Greece.

Performed in English with Greek surtitles.

Little Eyolf
by Henrik Ibsen
Directed by Dinos Psychogios

Dinos Psychogios takes on Henrik Ibsen’s classic masterpiece Little Eyolf, proposing a contemporary stage interpretation of the story through the lens of a generation struggling to redefine the values, boundaries, and responsibilities inherited from those who came before it.

On stage, an exceptional group of actors comes together: Alexandros Vardaxoglou, Aulona Lupa, Phaedra Angelaki, and Pashe Kolofotias.

In one of his mature realist works, written in 1894, Ibsen does not confine himself to the expected reactions to such a devastating reality but ventures much deeper. He focuses on the catalytic consequences of grief and guilt upon his favored subject of study—the couple—who, through sorrow and pain, are called to redefine their place in the world, to repair what can be repaired, and to discover new ways of connecting.

Director’s Note

How do we measure loss? What does “human responsibility” truly mean?

A child is lost at sea. With his death, he becomes the mirror in which his parents are forced to confront themselves: their unfulfilled desires, their guilt, their inability to connect. Regret for what was not done when it should have been turns into mourning, anger, and estrangement. Eyolf was always the shadow that concealed their secrets.

For us, Eyolf’s loss symbolizes the dreams we have lost. The lost expectations of our generation. The absence of every Eyolf compels people to look themselves straight in the eye—as individuals, as members of communities, as parents, siblings, partners. In a generation marked by uncertainty, excessive technology, fragile freedom, declining birth rates, and the constant renegotiation of the institution of the family, the concept of “human responsibility” carries a new weight—one we are trying to bear.

Dinos Psychogios

Duration: 90 minutes

AORISTOS (PAST TENSE)
by Eleftheria Papoutsaki

Psychoanalytic, Lacanian, Reichian, cognitive, behavioral, systemic, Gestalt.

Two and a half self-contained stories about the wondrous world of psychotherapy, presented as a chamber musical.

How we, as clients, perceive our therapists; the strange relationship that develops between the armchairs; and the peculiar nature of time itself— especially, the Past Tense (Aoristos).

A theatrical performance based on the book by Eleftheria Papoutsaki, “Past Tense: Stories and Snapshots from the Reverse Side.”

“Geese”
Written and directed by Stella Zafeiropoulou

In a small provincial town, nothing stays hidden for long. Sofia is a young woman adopted by Kyriaki. Her ancestry constantly becomes a source of conflict between them, while the comments and interference of those around them further destabilize their fragile balance. As Kyriaki secretly struggles with questions surrounding the management of her property and her inheritance, Sofia experiences love and believes she has finally found happiness. However, the revelations that follow will overturn everything, leading them toward unpredictable and tragic developments.

Geese, the award-winning play by Stella Zafeiropoulou (Greek Screenwriters’ Union Award, 2017), is presented for the first time on stage at PLYFA Theatre from February 11, 2026. It is a story that dares to confront deeply rooted prejudices about parenthood, biological lineage, fear of the foreign and the different, the difficulty of integrating it into our culture — as well as an insatiable love of money.

Stella Zafeiropoulou, one of the most dynamic representatives of the new generation of Greek playwrights, who was recently nominated for the “Karolos Koun” Award for Greek dramaturgy for her play Fly (2025, Olvio Theatre), directs the play herself this time. Presenting her first directorial work on the Greek theatrical stage, she notes about Geese:

Geese is a story of selection. Of children in institutions, of the children who were chosen and those who stayed behind. But there’s more than that. It is also the story of a mother and daughter who never truly saw one another as such, as well as the ongoing narrative of a segment of people who make up small communities and who hypocritically and quite unorthodoxly preserve the old roots of these societies in barren soil when it comes to welcoming the foreigner into their “ancestral lands.” I consider it important that my works originate from real events and engage with a reality that I construct using theatrical terms. The same applies here:  Geese is based on a story that came to me and served as a starting point for creating images. This is also what I want to do with my direction — to highlight the images of the text, and why not, to create new ones. And as time passes and I study Geese from the outside, no longer as their creator, I increasingly feel my detachment from the text and my connection to it under different terms. What I know for certain, however, is that whether in one way (as a writer) or another (as a director), what I need to do is place it on tracks along which it can move smoothly and without obstruction.

Duration: 85 minutes

“Bitter Orange Tree Needles” by Panayiotis Kalivitis
Direction Dimitra Dermitzaki

What does a person do when they suddenly come very close to death?
What do many people do at the same time when they suddenly come very close to death?
What does someone do when they struggle to form living, breathing relationships?
What happens in a city full of parallel monologues?
How do parallel monologues interact?
How is the social fabric held together?
How does one feel reassured that everything will be alright?
What happens when, in the midst of absolute disaster, everyone sees opportunities for professional, personal, or emotional advancement?

Micrographia is pleased to present the first staging of The Bitter Orange Tree Needles, the play by Panagiotis Kalyvitis, winner of the 2020 Best Play Award. It will be mounted at PLYFA, in hall 7A, directed by Dimitra Dermitzaki, starting January 26th, 2026, every Monday and Tuesday at 21:15, for a limited number of performances.

Wishing to speak about things slightly more complex — unprepared, peculiar, awkward, or clumsy — that take place within private spheres, within individualities, it seems we stand before an ideal condition. Because the temporality the play handles is the pandemic, the horrific year 2020, and the sounds, images, quirks, and habits that this year revealed or cultivated, and which remain with us to this day. What do we hear? What do we see, and how do we approach the flood of information?

Everything seems continuous. Without pause. Soaked in simplification. Simplification and proclamations. In the play, these proclamations lead the bodies of some characters all the way to the distant year 2039 — where the pandemic of evil, this time lodged even deeper within, strikes again.

By the time the performance we are preparing reaches its premiere,
six whole years will have already passed since the outbreak of the pandemic,
and since that first, unprecedented experience of lockdown and quarantine.

A young doctor in the play wears a suffocating mask.
He thinks: “Absolute isolation, therefore absolute protection.”
But how much protection is truly found in isolation — and how much danger?

The performance is presented with the Support of the Ministry of Culture and the generous sponsorship of the Stegi “Vitsentzos Kornaros.”

Duration: 80 minutes
Suitable age: 16+

Phyllostormni

“Phyllostormni” is a hybrid term.
It denotes a space where fragments — of time, of memory, of bodies — accumulate and form new ground.
A name for a place that did not previously exist, but is born from whatever falls and whatever remains.

Phyllostormni is a scenic composition unfolding in a non-place, after the collapse of linear time. It is not an answer, but a question: what does it mean to exist today, when certainties have dissolved and the future does not arrive?

Where do we stand as bodies, as collectivities, as erotic desires that persist nevertheless? The stage functions like a capsule-shelter: a space where past, present, and future have already collapsed into fragments. A phrase by Barthes, a life vest, a Joy Division song, a selfie, a touch — all coexist, without linearity yet with the human insistence to be preserved. And among them, love: not as narrative, but as pulse; as the small spark resisting decay. The performers do not play characters; they are survivors of a society that has changed
radically. With their bodies they carry memories and desires like ritual objects, and relive them: sometimes playfully, sometimes exhausted, sometimes tenderly.

Each scene becomes a silent prayer before nightfall. A chorus of voices without voice, insisting on forming community — and on keeping love alive, even as everything around them decomposes.

Phyllostormni is a political gesture of silence and desire. It does not narrate events, but the moment when collectivity becomes body again; where memory becomes action, and poetry becomes a mode of resistance. And love — fragile, imperfect, endless — functions as that thin thread binding those who remain. It does not depict an era; it seeks a new chorality, a shared presence born from the necessity of the now. It is a ritual space where memory is experienced collectively; a work that wonders how we stand together — without time, without narrative, without roles — only with the desire to hold on to something common. And within this “common,” love also becomes part of resistance: a warmth that does not fade.

Among the fragments, we are still here.

AUTHOR–DIRECTOR’S NOTE

For me, Phyllostormni is an act of persistence.
An attempt to stand within the chaos — not to control it,
but to live through it collectively.

It was born out of the need to rediscover the body as a site of political action;
to remember that theatre is not escape, but a community under trial.
An act of silent resistance against speed,
against the power of the image, against the productivity that exhausts.

There are no heroes here — only survivors.
Bodies carrying stories, silences, memories,
and trying to find how to stand beside one another.
To share the exhaustion and the warmth of the moment.

Within this field, love as a concept and play as a form of communication become modes of
resistance.
They pass from body to body, from language to language,
sometimes tenderly and sometimes ironically,
transforming the stage into a site of expression and rupture.
The stories intertwine, the roles shift,
the forms struggle to find their shape within the fluidity of the now.

Phyllostormni moves between the sacred and the ridiculous,
the political and the erotic, the ritual and the pop.
There, in the midst of contradictions, I find true theatre —
where body, memory, and imagination meet.

I am not interested in certainty, but in presence.
The moment when something is born without your knowing why.
The moment you remember that even within the wreckage,
there is always a leaf falling slowly, being born again,
reminding us that we are still here.

Duration: 60-75 minutes

L E M O N at P L Y F A

8 years of journeys in 8 + 1 performances!

*The performance is presented with English surtitles

In 2018, Lemon began its journey by stepping off the theatrical ship of Athens out of a need to be in every corner of Greece to offer a cultural opportunity to residents of decentralized areas.

After 8 years of original performances between land and sea, the incredible story of the virtuoso pianist 1900 -who never got off the ship on which he was born- anchors for 8 + 1 unique performances at PLYFA.

25,000 spectators, 184 performances in remote areas of Greece, countless meetings with people-spectators who never left their home. The independent and handmade artistic production of Lemon continues to connect the points of our collective map broadening the boundary between theatre and real life. Proposing an active theatre, with a social footprint and political prothesis.

“theatre exists where spectators exist”

Lemon returns to Athens after 42 consecutive sold-out performances at the abandoned Bageion hotel during the 2019-2020 season, where the performance travelled by word of mouth.

The raw and atmospheric industrial space of PLYFA in Votanikos will be the ideal setting both for the story of the greatest pianist of the Ocean and for the story of Lemon’s journey.

“We played so the world wouldn’t feel the passage of time”

Conceived, artistically directed, site-adapted and produced by Melachrinos Velentzas and with the support of local communities, Lemon continues its research journey sometimes on land, sometimes at sea and sometimes somewhere in between: on board ships, in shipwrecks and anchored ships, on beaches and breakwaters as well as in village squares, on a lemon process factory, in abandoned places where a theatrical performance is presented for the first time.

The award-winning performance-experience thrills audiences wherever it is presented receiving excellent reviews. Energy that floods the stage, moves and excites in 70 torrential minutes of a deeply human story that brings to the surface the existential question:

“Where do you feel happy?”

The story of the pianist 1900, based on the original text by Italian writer Alessandro Baricco (translation: Stavros Papastavrou) and adapted-directed-choreographed by Georgia Tsagkaraki is brought to life on stage by the actor and pianist Melachrinos Velentzas in the role of 1900 and the actor Giorgos Drivas in the role of the trumpeter Tim Tooney.

Before the start of each performance, spectators can arrive earlier at PLYFA to travel through these 8 years through photos and videos that will be projected in the space. 

The set of parallel actions aims at the activation of the senses with the goal of a pure collective performance experience, which will remind us of the ritualistic character of theatre.

On Saturday, February 21st and Sunday, March 1st, after the end of the performance, a live piano will follow with Melachrinos Velentzas taking us on a special night in the company of his piano and his personal narratives: stories full of memories from these 8 years.

Plot Summary

The play unfolds at the beginning of the previous century on the steamship Virginian, which is making the transatlantic journey from Europe to America. A newborn baby is abandoned by his immigrant parents inside a box of lemons on the grand piano, in the first-class ballroom. The sailor who finds him gives him his own name: Danny Boodman and along with it the nickname T.D. Lemon (from the box of lemons) adding 1900 (from the year he found him). Danny Boodman T.D. Lemon 1900 will become the greatest pianist of the Ocean. The trumpeter Tim Tooney -1900’s only friend- encourages the latter to step onto the land to experience another life.

What has been written about the performance

«…their energy floods the stage… an ingenious performance for two actors…» Athinorama | Tonia Karaoglou

«They truly give their all on stage!» Euronews | George Mitropoulos

«…a 2 men show!» Athens Voice | Stefanos Tsitsopoulos

«Those who saw it, wrote the best. And perhaps, for the first time in my life, I will agree with all my colleagues!» EfSyn (Newspaper of the Editors) | Nora Ralli

«…no make-up needed for those actors, who also impersonate jugglers for the needs of the role. They can feel proud for the many times they conspiratorially showed us the royal road to emotion…» in.gr | Dimitris Doulgeridis

«A pocket musical with two wonderful actors!» Grafein | Konstantinos Bouras

«A small diamond!» Tetragwno.gr | Kostas Zisis

«…the performances are excellent, moving and captivating the audience…» Theatromania | Maria Mari

«I was impressed by the seriousness and quality of a very difficult endeavor!» Huffington Post | Manos Stefanidis

«Melachrinos Velentzas plays the piano, dances, sings. His energy floods the stage. George Drivas is equally effusive!» PRAKTOREIO free press | Christos Kalountzoglou

«…a feast of poetic language, flawlessly choreographed movement, breathtaking aerial acrobatics, and abundant wonderful music, performed live…» diastixo.gr | Marion Choreanthi

«A meticulous work that stands out for the energy of the actors in a space that suits it!» Clickatlife | Ioanna Vardalachaki

«A duo with explosive on-stage chemistry elevates the legendary pianist 1900!» Woman TOC | Georgia Karkani

«…with momentum, passion, enthusiasm they craft their theatrical story in a handmade way…» Tovima (Sunday Edition) | Myrto Loverdou

«…their chemistry is terrific…» Debop.gr | Sofia Alexiou

Duration: 70 minutes (no intermission)
Suitable age: 4 to 104