Together with the talented ensemble of the Studio Players, Şahika Tekand -who has written, directed, and performed in numerous tragedies and comedies about modern life, particularly the world of the last thirty years and human behavior, tendencies, amnesia, the dismantling of concepts and values, and the acceptance of unprincipledness as a skill -is wandering around the highest peaks of Olympus this time. She presents a lighthearted, sarcastic performance language by addressing all the above-mentioned phenomena with an ironic approach.
The play, which pays tribute to the world of classical and contemporary masters of comedy such as Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett and Aristophanes in both text and performance, also includes excerpts from the author’s previous plays. The play is set on a day when the inhabitants of Mount Olympus are discussing and trying to understand their own situation in relation to the state of the world and humanity. Zeus, who has reached the point where he is physically and mentally incapacitated by dysfunction, tries to make the commitment to continue his remaining time bearable and enjoyable for himself. In ‘Are They Dying or What?’, Tekand takes an ironic look at concepts such as power, marriage, work, justice, reason, opportunity and war, bringing myths to the level of humanity.
The play acquires a musical character through the interaction of the performers’ speech patterns and the relationship between the sounds that they make with their props and the musical cues. Tekand’s game structure, which creates performative reasons, compels the actors to give a performance that pushes their acting and musical abilities to the limit. The audience is invited to take part in a magical and entertaining flow where the musicality of the speech generates the musicality of the movement and the movement creates the musicality of the speech, all within the framework of this musical structure.
