REVIEW: The Festival d'Avignon Presents LA DISTANCE By Tiago Rodrigues

A two-person epistolary drama between a father and daughter - On the surface, this sounds like the kind of conventional, writer-driven theatre that the Festival d’Avignon seeks to disrupt. Yet, coming from the mind of Tiago Rodrigues, La Distance becomes a conduit for deeper reflections on memory, family, and the social questions that linger in their wake. Now playing at L’Autre Scène du Grand Avignon, Rodrigues’s moving new work imagines an intimate, quotidian tragedy set in a not-too-distant and collapsing future.

The year is 2077. Earth has become increasingly inhospitable, and a father sends a message to his daughter, unaware that she has chosen to leave for Mars. Once she arrives on the red planet five months later, she responds. Over the course of this one-act play, they exchange messages that gradually escalate in urgency. The father passes through the stages of grief, desperately trying to convince her to return. Rodrigues’s world-building for this fictional universe is expertly paced: at first, the dialogue feels familiar, echoing many parent-child conversations across generations. But as the daughter reveals her intention to undergo a treatment that will erase her Earthly memories to help build a new human utopia on Mars, the piece shifts. What begins as family drama transforms into a kind of reverse-Alzheimer’s tragedy, infused with speculative weight.

La Distance fits squarely within the tradition of playwright-driven theatre, akin to the work seen at The Signature Theatre, Atlantic Theater Company, or MTC. Yet Rodrigues’s direction and Fernando Ribeiro’s scenography elevate the piece beyond dramatic minimalism. The stage is dominated by a large circular platform dusted in red, bisected by an upturned tree and a jagged outcrop of rock. As each character speaks, the platform slowly rotates, gaining momentum as the days pass and the emotional stakes rise. Rui Monteiro’s lighting shifts from warm sepia to surreal purples, suggesting aescents into dream and memory.

At the center of the piece are two deeply grounded performances from Alison Deschamps and Adama Diop. They have charged their onstage relationship with personal and political history. Deschamps plays the daughter with a carefully guarded confidence that cracks under emotional strain. Diop gives us a father devastated to learn his daughter is choosing a future that excludes him. Both performances are quietly shattering.

While this year’s Festival has featured its share of sweeping epics, its heart has been unmistakably intimate. Directors and writers have attempted to carve out moments of personal resonance amid increasingly chaotic ecosystems. Rodrigues’s La Distance is no exception. Its central conflict resonates across questions of climate collapse, migration, and political futurism, but ultimately returns us to a single question: What do we owe those we love? The global catastrophe is not the play’s subject; it is the backdrop for a human conversation. The result is a profoundly moving, imaginative, and accessible drama, from a playwright who deserves serious attention from American institutions and artists alike.

Photo Credit: Christophe Raynaud de Lage / Festival d’Avignon

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