Event Category: Theater

MENGELE
by Thanasis Triaridis
directed by Vana Pefani
Returning to PLYFA for the 2nd time before Zurich

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Following the success of the production at PLYFA in October 2025 and its presentation in Zurich in January 2026 at Bühne S – Theater im Bahnhof Stadelhofen, where it will return in January 2027, “Mengele” returns to Athens.

The play by Thanasis Triaridis, directed by Vana Pefani, returns to PLYFA for 7 exclusive performances, from 8 to 17 October.

A gripping psychological thriller, filled with unexpected twists and chilling reflections on human nature, starring Giorgos Nasios and Eva Piadi, with live music and sound textures by Orestis.

From 8 October, and for seven performances only (8, 9, 10, 11, 15, 16 and 17 October), Athens audiences will have the opportunity to experience this unique production once again.

Vana Pefani creates an immersive theatrical experience inspired by real psychological experiments. The theatre becomes a laboratory, where the audience is invited to choose: will they take the position of the experimental subject or that of the researcher? This is not simply a performance, but an experience that demands active participation.

“Mengele”, a landmark work in Thanasis Triaridis’ dramatic writing, was written in 2012 and, over the course of a decade, has been presented at more than 15 different venues in Athens, in other cities across Greece, and in Cyprus. It is a text that attempts to confront one of the most unimaginable horrors of modern history: Josef Mengele’s infamous experimental laboratory at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Today, at a time when the boundaries of human violence and morality are once again being tested, the play comes to shake us and remind us of the words of Italian-Jewish writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi: “What has happened once is certain to happen again.”

A few words about the story:

On a night journey aboard an electric train, an administrative employee and a PhD candidate in History — two complete strangers — find themselves sharing the same compartment. A sudden power outage leads them into a childhood role-playing game: he becomes the infamous “Angel of Death,” Josef Mengele, while she becomes Esther, the granddaughter of a Jewish survivor of his experiments.

But the game soon crosses the line. Are the two “players” merely acting, or are they revealing a terrifying truth? How far can they go when they play with History, morality, and human nature itself?

The Playwright’s Note:

For twelve years now, with every new production of this play, I have been confronted with the same question: “But why do you write about Mengele?” And I always give the same answer: “Because he existed — therefore, he can exist again at any moment. I write about Mengele because I want to demonstrate that the horror of the Holocaust is constantly present. Evil does not come from the heavens, nor from the depths of some nonexistent Hell. Evil is within us — and it takes an ethical struggle and cultural vigilance to ensure that we are not the ones who put people on trains bound for another Auschwitz.”

And I want to say something else. All my life I have written about the massacred civilians who are wiped out in the death laboratories of various forms of power. In my mind, Mengele’s twins stand alongside the enslaved children of all centuries, the children of massacred Indigenous peoples of the New Worlds, the mutilated victims of the Congo, the children being killed in Gaza, and the countless children of our world who die — or, more precisely, are killed — in Sub-Saharan Africa from hunger, poverty and deprivation. They belong to the great community of those unjustly slaughtered throughout History, to whom I feel I am accountable.

— Thanasis Triaridis

The Director’s Note:

“Mengele” is not a performance. It is an in-between space. A bardo of violence. Not the great, historical kind. The small kind. The silent kind. The individual kind. The everyday kind. The kind that has no screams, only whispers. That does not spill blood, but slowly corrodes.

The play’s two protagonists do not know whether they are still inside the experiment or outside it. They do not know whether they are perpetrators or victims. Perhaps neither do we.

Perhaps they are not people at all, but questions in human form. A light that comes on. A light that goes out. And a society watching — with nervous laughter? With indifference? Perhaps with horror? — an experiment that never ends.

The play is being staged now because we live in a world where words such as morality, conscience and responsibility are gritting their teeth. Because darkness is here — and it does not ask for answers, only that we acknowledge its existence. That we see it. And perhaps that is the most difficult thing of all.

— Vana Pefani

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Duration: 80 minutes
Age recommendation: 16+

GEESE
2nd year

Stella Zafeiropoulou

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Following a successful debut, “Geese” returns to PLYFA for a second year.
This season, Maria Antoulinaki takes on the role of Kyriaki.

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In a small provincial town, nothing stays hidden for long. Sofia is a young woman adopted by Kyriaki. Her ancestry constantly become 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 second time on stage at PLYFA Theatre from November 18, 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.

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Duration: 100 minutes, no intermission

*Exceptionally, during the second week of December, performances will take place on Monday and Tuesday, December 7 & 8, 2026.

Kane ligo pio kei

Mutabor

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October 3, 4, 10, 11 & 17 and November 13 & 20, 2026
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Stench. We’re surrounded by corpses again.

The Mutabor theatre company presents the original play Kane ligo pio kei, a performance that explores, through the absurd, the grotesque and the painfully familiar, the human need for freedom, the burden of social roles, family, love, alienation and death.

In an apartment.

High-ceil-inged. Clut-tered.

Inside, a Lady, a Maid, a son, Lo, and between them, the corpses.

Always inside.

Locked in the house, they try to digest the roles they believe life has forced upon them.

But what happens when someone decides not to obey? Resisting social conventions can bring freedom. But is everyone capable of handling the weight of being free?
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The Play

In a high-ceilinged, cluttered apartment lives Lo’s family: the Lady, his mother, a Maid, and corpses.

Lo works as a corpse cleaner. His daily encounters with the dead exhaust him, while at the same time becoming, paradoxically, a form of liberation.

The Lady constantly demands that he fulfil roles, identities, wishes and chores. She grows increasingly irritated; the more pressure he is under, the more he rises up against her.

Completing the picture is the Maid, who is constantly searching for her mop.

And the corpses? Like conductors, they shape the flow of the story as the characters gradually begin to lose their sense of self and their certainties.

Until a letter disrupts the fragile balance.

In the end, if you free yourself from the role you were given, are you ready to take responsibility for your freedom?

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The Performance

Kane ligo pio kei places at its centre the responsibility that comes with shedding social roles.

In a society that demands that we all be functional, useful and accepted, what price does someone pay when they refuse to conform to the profile of the “healthy”, socially acceptable person?

What happens when someone does not want to perform the role assigned to them? How much alienation and loneliness can freedom conceal? And how easily does difference become deviation, and deviation become stigma?

In the world of the play, the corpses embody the doubt that arises when people feel inadequate in the face of what is expected of them.

Why do we build our own prison and remain inside it, even when there is an escape plan?

And ultimately: do the characters find liberation, or do they remain imprisoned?

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Duration: 80 minutes

HORNY FANS

INDEPENDENT ARTISTS

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Within a reality shaped by economic insecurity, the home becomes a space for invention, where the body, the image, everyday life and time become materials for negotiation. The need for survival encounters desire, the absurd, and the persistent attempt to imagine a future.

The home becomes a stage.

The body becomes content.

Desire becomes labour.

And time becomes space.

Amid a reality of economic insecurity, some people search for a way to keep going. The need to survive becomes a need to invent, and the home gradually transforms into an improvised space of work and exposure.

What once belonged to private life begins to become material. Intimacy becomes content, and life starts to resemble a performance that never ends.

It is then that time becomes strange. What happened yesterday may feel as though it happened only moments ago, while tomorrow remains constantly outside the frame.

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Duration: 80 minutes, no interval
Suitable for: 16+

*For this performance, tickets purchased at the box office can only be paid for by card (POS).

THE TRUTH IS

by Dimitris Dimitriadis
Directed by Grigoris Karantinakis
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2nd successful year

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Truth, antonym: Falsehood

Falsehood, synonym: Non-acceptance of the Truth

Dimitris Dimitriadis’ The Truth Is, directed by Grigoris Karantinakis, could be an incident from a police report, elevated through the dimensions of poetic language, dramatic writing and dramaturgy.

And yet, it is a contemporary portrait of human character, deeply existential and intensely charged: a confessional text that reveals the dark side of truth.

Two figures are present, the father and the mother, while their son, deafeningly absent yet ever-present, unravels the thread of their truth.

Their son’s life does not conform to their principles. Their seemingly spotless environment, their respectable family and their devout image all collapse when their child chooses to be “different.” Their values, beliefs and principles are shaken, and so they decide to remove him from their lives.

The play lays bare the hypocrisy and violence of the contemporary human being’s false life. The parents remain steadfast in their harsh decision, impatient for its implementation, and endure its consequences.

In one of his most revealing theatrical texts, Dimitriadis gives voice to truth, not so that it may be heard, but because it can no longer remain silent.

A performance about the things we have never dared to say.
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But will we ever speak our own truths?

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Duration: 80 minutes, no interval
Note: The performance contains gunshots and smoking

Golden Record

The b.p.m. theatre group presents the new theatre work by Danai Liodaki

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What is worth preserving from the history of humanity? This is the question from which Golden Record, the new performance by Danai Liodaki, takes its starting point. The performance takes us back to 1977, when NASA created a record containing music, images and sounds and sent it into space aboard the Voyager mission, in an attempt to introduce life on Earth to an unknown extraterrestrial recipient. The performance returns to this real-life event, revisiting it in an era of war and destruction.

Almost fifty years after the spacecraft was launched, two sisters, while clearing out their parents’ house in a small village in Greece, discover a series of letters that bring a family secret to light. As they unravel the thread of the story, they travel through Greece during the struggle against the dictatorship and into a world changing at dizzying speed. From the neighbourhoods of New York and the creators of the Golden Record, to the Lebanese Civil War and the Palestinian people’s resistance, personal journeys become inextricably intertwined with major historical events of recent decades, revealing a hidden history that emerges from the past to illuminate the future.

Blending fiction with real historical figures and events, Golden Record is a work about memory, loss, and resistance to oblivion. A deeply anti-war work that seeks out the stories of those who were left outside official historical narratives.

Danai Liodaki (“Match,” “Those You Didn’t Get to See,” “Hyperspace or Otherwise…,” “With the Bees or with the Wolves”) continues to engage with contemporary political and social issues, proposing theatrical forms that combine elements of contemporary fiction and documentary theatre. The play Golden Record is published by Kapa Publishing.

The performance was presented as part of the 2026 programme of the Greek Ministry of Culture’s “All of Greece, One Culture” initiative.

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Duration: 90 minutes, no interval

SEBASTIAN
Nova Melancholia

SEBASTIAN returns for two unique nights in Athens before being presented at the Nicosia International Festival 2026. The performance has been honored by the Theatre and Performing Arts Critics Association with the Performing Arts Award. A performance with a “camp” sensibility, a kaleidoscope of references around the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, an avatar of desires and moods that plays with death and exorcises the darkness of our days.

Sebastian is a multiprismatic archetype, a kaleidoscope, an avatar of moods and desires. Delving into the tradition of Saint Sebastians’ martyrdom, as recast through its dense representation in Western art from early Renaissance onwards, we focus on concepts / senses / symbols resonating with our own sensibilities and imagination. The performance is the grand sum of its cultural references. We read poems, recreate paintings, mince, pose, sing, dance, and draw inspiration from an eccentric cinematic tradition of experimentation. We are interested in exploring those affective and bodily practices which will enable us to relate to a symbol like Sebastian in the present.

Saint Sebastian is associated with youth, beauty, sports, archery, physical pain, salacity, homoeroticism and martyrdom. Already since medieval times, there is a strong connotation linking him to the Plague, Black Death. We tie together the tradition of homoeroticism as expressed through the figure of Sebastian and the AIDS disease, which, in the 80s and 90s, came to be regarded as a kind of ‘homosexual plague’. Just like people did in early European modernity, we too resort to Saint Sebastian, assigning him with an apotropaic function to help us ward off evil. The show is dedicated to those who dare cross over from vision to lived experience, from representation to presence, thus taking the risk of being consumed by the blazes of existence.

The performance is dedicated to HIV-positive activist Zack/Zackie who was brutally murdered in Athens in September 2018, and experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger who died in May 2023.

“The language of theatre is not ‘natural’. We have to create it over and over again (says Roland Barthes). And we are indeed so rarely given the opportunity to watch a group of people construct their own language in front of us! Piece by piece, this precious pastiche called SEBASTIAN is moulded in Nova Melancholia’s performance.”

Louiza Arkoumanea (theater critic)

“SEBASTIAN is the most beautiful – so to speak – and thoughtful and elaborate performance I have seen in recent years, with a language that connects references and personal emotions and metaphors from art and experiences without pretension, in a way that is honest and effortless and ultimately redemptive.” 

Argyro Bozoni (art journalist)

“For the first time, a younger generation of creators is approaching AIDS primarily as a cultural legacy, as an archive of images, losses, and forms of resistance that continues to organize collective queer memory.”

George Sampatakakis (prof. University of Patras) 

http://www.novamelancholia.gr/en

LE RAGAZZE PERDUTE
«THE LOST GIRLS»
A NEW PIECE DIRECTED BY GRACE ANDREWS

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Meet us within the restless pulse of ‘50s-70s Naples, where Lenú fights to unravel her lifelong entanglement with Lila, her brilliant friend. Fuelled by rivalry, revenge and devotion, they race from childhood to motherhood in a city alive with fierce contradiction, held up by a fragile community built on violence, ambition and brutal love.

Inspired by the Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante, this new piece from the Athens Fonact Ensemble explores how identity is made and unmade across generations of mothers and daughters in a world of men.

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WITH TEXT FROM:

THE NEAPOLITAN NOVELS BY ELENA FERRANTE

MY BRILLIANT FRIEND PLAYTEXT BY APRIL DE ANGELIS

 MY BRILLIANT FRIEND SCREENPLAY BY SAVERIO COSTANZO

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Duration: 1,5 hour
Suitable for: 13+

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+