The Piece (2017)

About

The Piece
by George D. Lembesi
Directed by Athena Xenidou
A collaboration with the Ministry of Education and Culture
It ’s a fantastic adventure about dreams and how we all have to try every day to get better and protect our dreams. Goula is a very small planet with two cities: the bright, beautiful, clean and organized Astarte and the dark, dusty and dirty city, Durta.
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About The Play

Original music: Monica
lyrics: Vangelis Lembesis,
set design: Thalia Melissa,
costume design: Anastasia Sarri,
lighting design: Panagiotis Tsevrenis,
choreography: Anthi Kettirou.
Starring Panagiotis Katsolis, Viki Kampouri, Katerina Choli, Evagoras Theodosiou, Stratos Chatzilia, Michalis Kornarakis, Maria Zitti, Kristiana Georgiou, Chrystalla Skordou and Konstantinos Dimitriou.

THE SEX LIFE OF MR. & MRS. NICOLAIDES (2014)

About

The Sex Life of Mr. & Mrs. Nicolaides
Την sold-out θεατρική παράσταση στην Ελλάδα «Η Σεξουαλική ζωή του κυρίου και της κυρίας Νικολαΐδη» της Δήμητρας Παπαδοπούλου παρουσιάζει στην Κύπρο η X.M.A.S. Events, σε σκηνοθεσία της Αθηνάς Ξενίδου Σε ένα ξεκαρδιστικό group therapy ο ψυχολόγος μαζί με τη βοήθεια του κοινού καλείται να δώσει λύση στα προβλήματα του ζευγαριού. Ο κύριος και η κυρία Νικολαΐδη, περνούν σεξουαλική κρίση μέσα στην οικονομική κρίση και o πιο φημισμένος ψυχοσεξολόγος της Ελλάδας αναλαμβάνει να λύσει το πρόβλημα, βάζοντάς τους σε ένα group therapy στο οποίο... συμμετέχει και το κοινό! Κοινό και ηθοποιοί γίνονται μία ομάδα ψυχοθεραπείας υπό τη διεύθυνση του αλλόκοτου γιατρού, ο οποίος τους καθοδηγεί όλους μαζί σε μία σεξουαλική ευτυχία! Με τους Ιεροκλή Μιχαηλίδη, Λευτέρη Ζαμπετάκη και Χριστίνα Μαρούχου.

The Stone (2013)

About

The Piece
by George D. Lembesi
Directed by Athena Xenidou
A collaboration with the Ministry of Education and Culture
It ’s a fantastic adventure about dreams and how we all have to try every day to get better and protect our dreams. Goula is a very small planet with two cities: the bright, beautiful, clean and organized Astarte and the dark, dusty and dirty city, Durta.
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About The Play

“As a house passes from owner to owner, and from generation to generation, the secrets buried in the garden and seeping from the walls reveal themselves.”
1935: A young couple buys the house from a Jewish family, and so the myth begins
1953: The couple’s daughter discovers the stone
1978: The family returns to claim what’s rightfully theirs
1993: The house is back in their possession
It’s important to mention that, although this is what happens chronologically in the story, the writer, Marius von Mayenburg, does not present the story in a linear way in the play. Instead, the time periods are interspersed and a scene in 1935 can appear just before or just after a scene in 1993 or another in 1978. By mixing up the chronology, the family’s secrets and past history can be revealed in a much more dramatic and complex manner.
Cast: Annita Santorinaiou, Stella Fyrogeni, Neoklis Neokleous, Elena Papadopoulou, Niovi CHaralambous, Antonia Charalambous

The Good Body (2013)

About

The Good Body
by Eve Ensler
Directed by Athena Xenidou
Produced by Xenia Joakim and Athena Xenidou
XMAS Productions
Melina Merkouri Theatre, Cyprus
About the Play
The Good Body is a play that is at once vulnerable, comical and heartbreaking. It consists of monologues – interviews that the writer took of women talking about their bodies. Ensler travelled to forty countries in six years gathering information and researching.
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The Good Body was first performed on Broadway in New York City in 2004. This was followed by a 20-city national tour in 2005.
Eve Ensler, draws on personal experience, candid interviews, haunting stories and forbidden topics relating to the female body to create a play that both questions and inspires.
The Good Body merges cross-cultural explorations with Eve’s own personal journey coming to terms with her” less-than-flat, post-forties stomach. Eve Ensler turns her unique eye to the rest of the female form. Whether undergoing bottox injections or living beneath burqas, women of all cultures and backgrounds feel compelled to change the way they look in order to fit in. “Maybe I identify with these women because I have bought into the idea that if my stomach was flat, then I would be good and I would be safe. I would be protected. I would be accepted, admired, important, loved. Maybe because for most of my life I have felt wrong, dirty, guilty and bad, and my stomach is the carrier, the pouch for all that self-hatred. Maybe because my stomach has become the repository for my sorrow, my childhood scars, my unfulfilled ambition, my unexpressed rage.”
“Tell the image makers and magazine sellers and the plastic surgeons that you are not afraid. That what you fear the most is the death of imagination and originality and metaphor and passion. Then be bold and LOVE YOUR BODY. STOP FIXING IT. It was never broken.” writes Ensler in The Good Body. In a world where lollipop figures of white actresses in Hollywood are considered culturally palatable internationally, The Good Body was written for the purposes of making women feel positive about and comfortable with themselves and their body image again.
“Probably the most important piece of political theatre of the last decade.” wrote The New York Times and “Ms Ensler wants to soften the ever-fraught relationship between American women and their bodies, to expose the destructive formulas that lead them to assuage their insecurities by punishing their flesh…rich in pointed, amusing details…forthrightly funny…bristling with wisecracks and exotically harvested snippets of wisdom.” Variety called it ‘Hilarious’ and San Francisco Chronicle called it “Passionate, funny, frank, revealing, even shocking and genuinely committed to improving life on this planet.”
Ensler’s work is perhaps most politically and socially relevant when she invokes what women should really be doing instead of continuing deeply disturbing patterns of self policing and self-loathing. While we are inside looking with dissatisfaction at our reflections in the mirror, the world continues to happen: the troops are not yet home from Iraq, our civil liberties are being pilfered from underneath us, and femicide continues to happen in parts of the world like the Congo, as a tactic of war. According to Ensler, it was never women’s bodies that needed to be fixed; it is the world, in fact, that needs our drastic renovation.
Ensler has written numerous articles for The Guardian, Huffington Post, Washington Post, Utne, International Herald Tribune, Glamour Magazine, Marie Claire and O Magazine. In 2009, Ensler was named one of the US News &World Reports ‘Best Leaders’ in association with the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School. In 20120 she was named one of the ’125 Women Who Changed Our World’ by Good Housekeeping Magazine. In 2011 she was named one of Newsweek’s ’150 Women Who Changed the World’ and The Guardians’ ’100 Most Influential Women.’
Eve Ensler has created V-Day, a global movement to stop violence against women and girls through benefit productions of The Vagina Monologues and other artistic works. To date, V-Day has raised more than $85 million and educated millions on the issue of violence against women and how to end it, crafted international educational, media and PSA campaigns, opened the revolutionary City of Joy community in the Republic of Congo and another in the Middle East, reopened and funded over 13,000 communities based anti-violence programs and safe houses around the world.
Cast: Xenia Joakim, Nedie Antoniades, Tania Skorda, Shaunna Ioannidou, Diane Avraamides, Tessa Kolessides, Jill Mac Donald, Christina Kamberi, Anca Pericleous, and Christina Marouchou.
All net profits went to the Shelter for Abused Women and Children in Cyprus.

After Miss Julie (2012)

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After Miss Julie
by Patrick Marber Directed by Athena Xenidou
Produced by Athena Xenidou, Foivos
Liasides and Stavros Xenides
XMAS Productions A production that included a six city tour in Cyprus and Greece.
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When Miss Julie – the bored, dangerous, newly jilted young mistress of a country house – descends into the kitchen to lay claim to, and hands on, her father’s chauffeur Jean (right in the face of the latter’s drudgingly obedient intended, Christine, a cook), it feels like the last hurrah for a dying breed about to be swept away in socialism’s new dawn. Yet as furtive carnality gives way to impossible fantasies of flight, the old order reasserts itself both in Miss Julie’s capacity to abuse her position and to feel suicidally caged too. How sharply all this savours in austerity Britain today, when we’re half in love – pace Downton Abbey and Upstairs, Downstairs – with old class distinctions and half furious that, after all this time, we’re being ruled by a cabinet of millionaires.
‘The one-act play, Miss Julie, is an early example of naturalism and is required reading for most beginning theatre students. Set in Norway, it concerns Julie, the daughter of a count, who has an affair with her father’s valet. Their roles are altered by their sexual act, and plans are made for the future, yet they continue to struggle with their own passions and the expectations of those around them — with tragic results. The small-cast Swedish language play was thought to have its first Broadway performance in 1913. Its first performance was in 1889, the year after it was written.
After Miss Julie was first staged in 2003 at London’s Donmar Warehouse. Marber, known for the play (and film) Closer, told Playbill magazine that his version is “much more a love story” and that Strindberg’s strikes him as more a “battle of the sexes…. Mine is much more specific and possibly smaller and less elemental and, I think, in its way truer.”
(www.playbill.com)
“a triumph of respectful tact and radical ingenuity!” -The Telegraph
‘My gravitational pull was towards solitude,’ Patrick Marber has said of his early career in stand-up comedy, that most solitary of performing arts. And yet, his real breakthrough was in those least solitary of forms, radio and television writing, where he collaborated in teams with the likes of Chris Morris and Steve Coogan in the mid-1990s, on award-winning programmes such as Knowing Me, Knowing You, The Day Today, and Paul and Pauline Calf’s Video Diaries.However, the gravitational pull of solitude was too great and Marber abandoned the rich rewards of television for playwriting, finding a powerful patron in Richard Eyre, director of the National Theatre, and an ideal space to experiment.” – Patrick Marber
Starring Greece’s jean-premier, Alexis Georgoulis, Kristie Papadopoulou and Nedie Antoniades

I Hate Hamlet (2011)

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I Hate Hamlet
by Paul Rudnick
Directed by Athena Xenidou
Theater Ena, Cyprus
Andrew Rally seems to have it all: celebrity and acclaim from his starring role in a hit television series; a rich beautiful girlfriend; a glamorous, devoted agent; the perfect New York apartment; and the chance to play Hamlet in Central Park. There are, however, a couple of glitches in paradise.
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Andrew’s series has been canceled; his girlfriend is clinging to her virginity with unyielding conviction; and he has no desire to play Hamlet. When Andrew’s agent visits him, she reminices about her brief romance with John Barrymore many years ago, in Andrew’s apartment. This prompts a seance to summon his ghost.
From the moment Barrymore returns, dressed in high Shakespearean garb, Andrew’s life is no longer his own. Barrymore, fortified by champagne and ego, presses Andrew to accept the part and fulfill his actor’s destiny.
The action becomes more hilarious with the entrance of Andrew’s deal-making friend from LA, spouting the laid-back hype of the Coast and offering Andrew a fabulous new TV deal worth millions of dollars.
Andrew wrestles with his conscience, Barrymore, his sword, and the fact that he fails as Hamlet in Central Park.
Cast: Sotiris Mestanas, Erica Mpegeti, Yiorgos Tziortzis, Manolis Michaelides, Penny Finiri and Julie Tsolka

Touch and Go (2011)

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Touch and Go
by Derek Benfield
Directed by Athena Xenidou
Dionysos Theatre

Comedy farce ‘Touch and Go’, by Derek Benfield, is a well-woven tale about suburban married life, affairs and all the complications endured by the four adulterers whose lies catch up with them.
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Introduce two couples, Jessica and George, and Brian and Hilary. Carefully planned meetings on Wednesday consist of George -lending his house to Brian. Brian has a girlfriend on the side, Wendy and they meet there, purely to go to bed, thinking that George goes to the pub to play darts. In fact, he nips round to Brian’s to indulge in Hilary, who thinks that her husband is out jogging. Jessica appeared pure until the final scene, when she arranges a Wednesday meeting with a secret lover.
The finale sees the five characters together, and all is revealed to a pleased Hilary, who is now free to do as she pleases, an outraged Brian, who thought he was getting the best of both worlds, and a scared George, who is convinced that Brian will do him in.
The play opened March 2011, starring Elena Christofi, Christos Yiangou, Christina Marouchou, Panayiotis Larkou and Penny Finiri.

The Vagina Monologues (2010)

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The Vagina Monologues
By Eve Ensler
Directed by Athena Xenidou and Thadd Correia
Produced by XMAS Productions and ACT

“If your vagina could dress what would it wear?”, “If your Vagina could talk what would it say in two words?’’, “What nickname do you have for your Vagina?”.
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Responses to these and other questions asked to women of all age groups and backgrounds around the world are shared in The Vagina Monologues.
Eve Ensler wrote the first draft of the Monologues in 1996 following interviews that she conducted with over 200 women.
The ultimate forbidden zone, THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES is a celebration of female sexuality in all its complexity and mystery. Real women’s stories of intimacy, vulnerability and sexual self-discovery. It gives voice to women’s deepest fantasies and fears, guaranteeing that no one who sees it will ever look at a woman’s body, or think of sex, in quite the same way again.
Some talk about their experiences of orgasm, others of how they live their menstrual periods. One rape victim from Bosnia talks about her present relationship with her vagina, another describes it as part of the miracle of birth.
The play opened in October 2010 to full theatres in Nicosia, Larnaca and Limassol.
All proceeds went to the following non-profit organizations that work in different capacities with girls and women in Cyprus: Association for the Prevention and Handling of Violence in the Family, Cyprus Family Planning Association and KISA.
Starring Alexia Paraskeva, Shaunna Ioannidou, Anne Constantinides, Tessa Kolessides, Penny Loizou, Alexandra Papadopoulos, Pola Papaleontiou, Cathey Smith, Jill McDonald, Magda Egoumenidou.

The Shadow Box (2007)

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The Shadow Box
by Michael Christofer
Directed by Athena Xenidou
National Theatre of Cyprus

The play -written by actor Michael Cristofer- made its Broadway debut on March 31, 1977. It won the Tony Award for Best Play and the Pullitzer Prize for Drama. Cristofer adapted the play for a television movie in 1980, directed by Paul Newman. It went on to win a Golden Globe and nominations for three Emmy Awards.
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The play revolves around a trio of terminally ill patients, each of whom lives in a separate cottage at a hospice facility. Each is being interviewed about the process of dying. For most of the play, the interviewer is unseen, which means that characters speak directly to the audience, as if they were the interviewer.
The first dying person is Joe, a middle-aged, blue-collar family man. Joe seems well-adjusted and has accepted that he is dying. However, his wife Maggie is in denial and has not told their son Steve about his father’s condition.
The second dying person is Brian, a bisexual English professor. He is being cared for by his lover, Mark. They receive a visit from Brian’s flamboyant, trashy ex-wife Beverly. Beverly’s presence lifts Brian’s spirits but rankles Mark.
The final dying person is Felicity, an elderly, cantankerous, woman who is suffering from dementia. She is being cared for by her long-struggling, devoted daughter Agnes. Felicity is in great pain but refuses to die because she remains hopeful that her favorite daughter, Claire, will return to her soon.
The Shadow Box was directed by Athena Xenidou in 2008 for the National Theatre in Cyprus.
Starring Stavros Louras, Lenia Sorokkou, Elena Papadopoulou, Andreas Vasiliou, Popi Avraam Michalis Kazakas and Sotos Stavrakis.
It was nominated for 3 awards at the National Theatre awards where it received Best Actor for Stavros Louras