Playwright/Director/Co-Producer: Dimitris Timpilis is a playwright, theatre director, and educator, trained in theatre direction at the National Theatre of Greece, and holds a Ph.D. in STEM Education from the University of Miami, where his dissertation explored AI's societal impact through Epic Theatre. His directing credits span the Experimental Stage of the National Theatre of Greece, Epikentro stage of Patras Municipal and Regional Theatre, venues in Athens and major cities in Greece, and educational theatre in Miami and New York. He worked as an assistant director and held a workshop on Science, Technology, Society at Thespis Theater in Astoria. Magma marks his debut as playwright of a full-length work.
www.dimitristimpilis.com/theatre
Cast:
Efi Kitsanta is a multidisciplinary actress from Greece, currently based in Brooklyn. She began her acting studies in Greece and continued her training in New York, attending classes at HB Studio, Stella Adler, and The Juilliard School. She has performed in numerous productions across Greece, Italy, and New York. Her recent credits include Women of Zalongo at HB Studio, Theater Will Not Prepare You for Death at La MaMa, The Princess Goes to War at the Hellenic Cultural Center, and Far Away at Moonlight Box Theater
Chrysi Sylaidi is an equity actor, producer, and director from Athens, Greece. She is a founder and co-Artistic Director of the award-winning, female-led theatre company, TeamTheatre. She has starred in dozens of productions in Greece and in New York and collaborated with important organizations such as the Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre, the National Theatre of Greece, the Stella Adler Studio of the Arts, Laguardia Performing Arts Center, Theatre East, The Flea Theatre, Cyprus New York Productions, Theatro Poreia, Theatro Akadimos, and Eclipses Group Theatre NY to name a few. She is a graduate of the 3-year Professional Conservatory at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting, a proud member of the Stella Adler Alumni Council, and Co-Chair of the Career Development Committee. Chrysi is also a human trying to make sense of the fact that this is the third time she is performing as an advanced AI.
Producer: Nikolas Kambouroglou is a technologist and manager with experience in the public utility and financial information sectors. During COVID, he produced a series of multicamera streaming live music performances with Sinafi Music Collective, bringing together teams of TV professionals, including James Sayegh, a BMCC professor with 15 years of experience directing daytime television, to create challenging electronic field productions. He has worked on multiple theatre and music productions as a multicamera director for live stage events and as a sound engineer for live music performances. He volunteers with Cosmos FM and the Greek Cultural Center.
Magma is a two-character sci-fi existential comedy, where Eve, a human worker, and Nova, a humanoid AI colleague, find themselves trapped in an elevator between floors and between increasingly unsettling questions about consciousness, free will, work anxiety, existential anxiety, and what separates the organic from the artificial.
What begins as awkward workplace small talk spirals through brain parasites, synthetic pets, gut microbiomes, and memes as cultural genes. Scene by scene, the elevator keeps breaking down until both characters and audience arrive at something unexpected. In its final movement, Magma breaks the fourth wall entirely, implicating the audience in the very process of meaning-making it describes. The elevator becomes a liminal space where the boundaries between character and spectator, artificial and organic, individual and society dissolve.
Who is really speaking when we speak? And who is listening?
Director’s Vision
πάντα ῥεῖ: All things flow -Heraclitus of Ephesus
What happens when the categories we use to organize reality begin to dissolve?
My staging vision strips the elevator to its skeleton. Black metal columns, light and sound, rendering the opening and closing of doors, and the stuck mechanism visible. The actresses float in an undefined space. Not a realistic set but a mind-space, what philosophers call the social imaginary: the shared field of meaning from which our institutions, categories, and identities emerge.
This is a liminal space. The magma beneath the Earth’s crust breaks through and reshapes the landscape. Only to cool into new forms that will themselves be melted down again.
We live at a threshold. AI is shaping our news, diagnoses, preferences, decisions, and understanding of what minds can be. Magma asks: Who is really speaking when we speak? Are we the authors of our thoughts, or conduits through which culture thinks itself?
Theatre is uniquely situated to explore these questions. Theatre is the social imaginary made visible. Actors pretending, audience believing, a shared reality emerging from two opposing worldviews on stage, observed and judged by an audience.
This play is an excavation. We dig into collective consciousness to uncover the structures shaping how we think before we know we are thinking. You are not passive observers but the witnessing and deciding third. The adjudicating plural third. The chorus that renders judgment. The ancient Athenians understood that theatre and democracy share the same architecture.
The elevator may be stuck, but the conversation will illuminate and shape our future decisions and actions.
Join us in this liminal space.
-Dimitris Timpilis