It was no tragedy.
Thespians from Bay Ridge’s Greek School of Plato had the crowd rolling on the floor with laughter during a production of the 1960s Greek cinematic classic “Ktipokardia Sto Thranio” at Xaverian High School on May 8. Students showed off their language skills, performing the entire Dionysian display in an old-school Mediterranean dialect, an organizer said.
“It was in Greek, and the Greek of the ’60s — today they use different slang, they were using different words for different things back then,” said Stefanie Christakos, a member of the Greek school’s board. “We literally took the movie from the ’60s and transcribed it verbatim with some edits to suit the younger audience.”
It was all Greek to the crowd — but that was okay, because they knew the tale and the tongue, she said.
“We got a lot of laughs,” Christakos said. “People were cracking up, singing, and clapping to the music — everybody knows this movie.”The film’s title roughly translates to “heart beating at my desk.” In it, a high-school girl fakes sick to get out of class and winds up falling in love with the young doctor who cares for her, going so far as to keep up her ruse to stay close to the man. She marries him but soon misses school and secretly goes back, arousing suspicion in her husband.
It was a rare modern comedy for the Greek School of Plato, which usually produces tragedies from the ancient heyday of Greek theater. The actors — sixth- to ninth-graders and a handful of alumni — were immediately enthusiastic about the production, Christakos said.
“This is probably the second time we’ve done a comedy, and [the students] were ecstatic to do a comedy and got so into their roles,” she said. “They saw the movie prior and really jumped in feet first.”
The production was a one-off, but the company plans to “take it on the road” to an upstate old-folks home it regularly performs at and may put on an encore and a performance in Brooklyn in the fall, Christakos said.“We’ve been bombarded with calls for an encore, so we’re working on the logistics of that,” she said. “We plan to — the kids are dying to put it on again.”
