About this Event
About the Play
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
https://www.magmaplural.com/theatre
Running time
Approximately 2 hours and 10 minutes, followed by a talkback and reception.
Date & Time
Saturday, January 17, 2026
11:00 PM – 2:00 PM EST
Location
The Harvey Fierstein Theatre Lab
New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
40 Lincoln Center Plaza
New York, NY 10023
Capacity
15 guests
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Harvey Fierstein Theatre Lab, 111 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, United States
USD 0.00
