- The Distant Lights Dance for Us,
- 2023
- 2 male - 1 female
Playwright: Michalis Malandrakis
- In midsummer, at an isolated café midway along Motorway 1, which connects Athens and Thessaloniki, three people struggle to keep alive a place that time seems to have forgotten. The café survives almost entirely on the brief stops made by intercity coaches. Stelios, twenty-two, is saving money in the hope of leaving the village and opening his own gym in Athens. Lefteris, around thirty, has taken the opposite route: he recently left the capital and ended up at the isolated café for reasons that remain unknown. Between them is Giota, fifty-five, who has spent her life in the area. Their monotonous routine is disrupted when the owner’s office is broken into and money goes missing. Suspicion soon falls on Lefteris. As he tries to prove his innocence and keep his job, he is forced to revisit the events that drove him to leave Athens and retreat to this in-between place on the map. As hidden truths come to light, the three characters reveal different relationships with escape, desire and failure. The Distant Lights Dance for Us is a play about escape and compromise, and about dreams that can both keep us alive and trap us. First public presentation: staged reading as part of “Wednesdays at the Experimental Stage”, National Theatre of Greece, February 2023. First Jury Prize and First Audience Prize, D-Athens Dionysia 2025.