Evangelos Papadakis, an actor and director working in Athens, Greece, will direct the Casus Belli theater group in a production of Beast on the Moon.
Casus Belli will run Richard Kalinoski’s award-winning play from Nov. 19 to Jan. 29, in the Simeio Theater, in Athens. Kalinoski is an internationally renowned theatrical playwright and faculty member at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.
“In such an unstable political environment where ‘refugees’ are a major political issue for Greece and for the rest of Europe, there is no better way of dealing with this theme than putting on stage, Beast on the Moon,” Papadakis said.
He speaks of the thousands of refugees from the Eastern countries that had to leave their homes, go to Istanbul and travel through the Mediterranean Sea to Greece, to Europe, to find a better life. Instead many found death.
“They were drowned. And those who survived death lost their families, lost their dignity, lost their identity,” Papadakis added. “What can be their future? How are they going to create new lives in foreign places? How can we—citizens of the Western world—show empathy for those less fortunate people?”
He said the play is about vulnerable refugee people struggling to keep their hopes alive while having lost everything as a result of the Armenian genocide in 1915.
“A century after the Armenian genocide, we are still witnessing identical ‘pictures’ of human loss. Why?” Papadakis said.
Learn more: