Made in USA | The Evening

A towering figure on the New York alternative scene, the multiple-award-winning director, composer and playwright Richard Maxwell (b. 1967) makes his Greek debut with his most recent work.

“The Evening” (2015), which has received glowing reviews in the US and Europe, is part of a triptych inspired by Dante’s “Divine Comedy”.
Maxwell puts three archetypal American anti-heroes—a wrestler, his corrupt manager and a prostitute/barwoman—in a nowheresville dive bar, somewhere in the vastness of the American hinterland.

Maxwell dissects the existential journey of his three characters with clinical precision in the form of a contemporary elegy. Capturing the unexpected poetry of dive bar speech, he wrests indisputably authentic performances from his cast—because the celebrated New York City Players bring the unfeigned theatricality of an unprecedented realism to their roles, which they perform on a cramped stage just a breath away from the audience to the accompaniment of a three-piece band.

As Maxwell sees it, salvation might actually lie in taking a long, hard look at the human condition, without sentimentality, castle-in-the-sky rhetoric or illusions. Which is precisely what this naked, infinitely honest theatre does.