BIRDS OF A KIND
by Wajdi Mouawad

BIRDS OF A KIND

by Wajdi Mouawad

Directed by Odysseas Papaspiliopoulos

From 23 December 2023

The award-winning play Birds of a kind, by the Lebanese-Canadian writer, director and actor Wajdi Mouawad, deals with the concept of identity as an aspect of self-definition but also with what it means to be trapped within rigid frameworks imposed on us by lineage, religion, tradition, family and ourselves.

Eitan, a German-Jewish genetics student at Columbia University, meets and falls in love with Wahida, an American student of Arab descent. Their relationship is met with hostility by Eitan's Jewish family. The couple's trip to Israel and a bomb attack that will send Eitan to hospital in a coma will be the starting point for a family's past to be uncovered. Secrets reverberate, the truth erupts, and everything that is familiar is torn to pieces in the maelstrom of world events that engulfs the play's characters.

From love at first sight to a terrorist attack, from laughter to screams, Mouawad weaves a love story with political dimensions and existential ramifications against the backdrop of the inextricable chaos of the Middle East. At the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the author asks, “Why must we be so fixated on our lost identities?”

A heartbreaking family crisis comes to the Nikos Kourkoulos Stage, where the familiar is fraught with violence and painful legacies. This is a play about identities, which while ensuring the security of belonging, at the same time create a prison for ourselves. In Birds of a kind, the characters plunge into a feverish journey of (self-)discovery, in a desperate attempt to fly like birds above and beyond the Israeli-Palestinian wall. For we must all be able to live like birds; like birds burning “with desire for the other, the different, and for this desire to be absolute, infinite, spiritual…”.

Production team
Historical advisor: Natalie Zemon Davis
Translator: Eleni Varopoulou
Director: Odysseas Papaspiliopoulos
Designer: Ilenia Doularidi
Music: Panos Gkinis
Movement: Avgoustinos Koumoulos
Lighting design: Zoi Molyvda-Fameli
Video: Apostolis Koutsianikoulis
Dramaturg: Eva Saraga
Directing assistant: Katerina Louvari Fasoi
Design assistant: Genevieve Athanasopoulou
 
Cast (in alphabetical order):
Babis Alefantis, Anna Mascha, Klearchos Papageorgiou, Dimitris Papanikolaou, Odysseas Petrakis, Melina Polyzoni, Alexandra Sakelaropoulou, Stefania Samara, Penelope Tsilika, Giorgos Ziovas