La Distance

Tiago Rodrigues, one of the great storytellers of contemporary theater, delivered a love letter to family in his latest work. A bond that stretched across planets, environmental collapse, and lifetimes.

Half a century from now, humanity teeters on the edge of survival. As life on Earth becomes increasingly fragile, a part of the population has relocated to Mars, striving to build new systems of living and coexisting. Tiago Rodrigues told the story of a father who chooses to stay behind, on Earth, unwilling to let go of a disappearing world, and a daughter who chooses Mars, embracing a future yet to be conceived. Though 225 million kilometers apart, as Rodrigues put it, “talking about distance, we also discover proximity […] The disharmony between collective ambition and the reality of political and economic power is one of our era’s great paradoxes. But I feel like someone who, after reading an encyclopedia, ends up writing a sonnet. It’s a magnification through miniaturization.”

Two worlds that, ultimately, became one.