Summer theater highlights at the Athens Festival
The pocket-size programs listing the Athens Festival’s performances are already available at kiosks across the city, while the event’s local and international audiences are checking their calendars and saving dates. The roster of events this summer showcases a number of noteworthy theater productions, with companies and artists from around the globe coming to the Athens Festival with ambitious works competing with the festival’s established names, including Germany’s Thomas Ostermeier and Italy’s Romeo Castellucci.
The first company to go on stage at the festival’s Pireos 260 venue is South Africa’s Baxter Theater Center. The troupe is set to perform “Mies Julie,” a play written and directed by Yael Farber, based on August Strindberg’s 1888 “Miss Julie,” in a three-night run from today to Saturday.
Established in 1977, the Baxter Theater Center is known for its creative plurality and has over the years played host to the country’s many different cultures, keeping its doors open to everyone, even in the dark days of apartheid. Meanwhile, Faber’s “Mies Julie” presents the complexities of South African society, its class system and racial discrimination. The play is in English, featuring Greek surtitles translated by Yannis Kalifatidis.
Coming up next is a company from Latvia. The New Riga Theater presents Tatyana Tolstaya’s “Sonja” at Pireos 260 from June 16 to 18. The state-run company has a permanent 25-member troupe and has collaborated with leading European theater institutions. Meanwhile, manager and director Alvis Hermanis is known for combining the abstract elements of Germany’s theater tradition with the playful and spontaneous acting of the Russian school. In “Sonja,” a male actor takes on the role of a middle-aged woman who spends her days baking cakes and taking care of her plants. Through this nondescript existence of a woman perpetually waiting for her prince to arrive, Tolstaya underlines the greatness of your average man or woman in the street.
A key figure on New York’s theater scene, Korean-born Young Jean Lee makes her Athens Festival debut with her namesake theater company in a play exploring her favorite subject matter: the issue of identity, whether national, social or sexual. In “Straight White Men,” to be performed at Pireos 260 on June 22-24, a typical middle-class American father and his three sons gather round the Christmas tree. The image of the happy modern family changes when one of the sons questions his family’s expectations of him. The restless director has been named the most adventurous playwright of her generation.
Another two foreign theater companies make their Greek debut this summer with performances in July. German women’s theater collective She She Pop goes on stage at Pireos 260 on July 11 and 12 with “Schubladen” (Drawers). In the play, six women from the former East and West Germanys exchange experiences and thoughts as they go through their drawers in search of memories from the objects they come across. French director Francois Tanguy and the Theatre du Radeau present fragments of plays and poems in a production billed as a stage workshop featuring texts by Euripides, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Ariosto, Moliere and Pavese, among others. Shows take place at the Pireos 260 venue from July 16 to 18.
Absence
Director-psychotherapist Vico Nahmias, who explored the uplifting aspects of swirling over the last 15 years, died last week. The Athens Festival presents his last project, “Strofodines,” at the Pireos 260 venue on June 20-22. The performance explores the liberating, euphoric aspects of the technique employed by the whirling dervishes.
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For more information, visit www.greekfestival.gr.
