LNDT Announces 5 New Season Premieres and the Return of Great Hall Hits
The Lithuanian National Drama Theatre (LNDT) has announced the repertoire for the 84th season (September 2023 – February 2024), which will include 5 premieres and the return of the audience's favorite and much-loved productions to the Great Hall. The 84th season of LNDT will start on 6 September with a new work for the teenage audience, "Roulette" by the Norwegian director Jo Strømgren, who is already well known to Lithuanians.
"We invite you to the new LNDT season – after seismic upheavals, we are entering the next stage. The past year has been uneven and polarised, complex and painful, and it is time to reflect on the past and look for a unifying present. The coming season will be sensitive, musical, and dialogical. We will invite conversations between generations, between humans and animals, between humans and planet Earth, between a human and a human, between life and death, between this galaxy and the next. We will start September with the premiere of Jo Strømgren's play "Roulette". We offer this play to teenagers, but as it is obvious that the current adolescence is prolonged, we welcome everyone to the season-opening", LNDT artistic directors Kamilė Gudmonaitė, Antanas Obcarskas, and Eglė Švedkauskaitė say as an invitation.
The second premiere of the LNDT autumn season is a performance by Yana Ross – – who is active and welcome in Europe, but rarely performs in Lithuania – based on David Foster Wallace's essay "Considering the Lobster". It is a conversation with people for whom it is easier not to think about what a lobster is reflecting on when it is put alive in a pot.
October will open with a children's premiere based on the book by Jurga Vilė and Lina Itagaki, "Siberian Haiku", directed by Augustas Gornatkevičius, that will look at ways to help the modern child to survive difficulties. In November, the young director Laura Kutkaitė will present a performance inspired by Guillaume Apollinaire's work, "The Breast of Tiresias". She will choreograph a dream about anger, tenderness, and the attempt to communicate between the genders.
It has not yet been revealed what kind of work will open the reconstructed Great Hall in early December. LNDT promises that the big news of the season will be revealed at the end of the summer. However, tickets for the returning hits of the Great Hall – the plays that audiences have been waiting for – are available now. These include "The Banishment", "Lokis", "The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet" and "Tartuffe".
In January, director Antanas Obcarskas will present "A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction", which he calls his manifesto for life.
In its 84th season, the "Versmė" Festival of Contemporary Playwriting, which takes place annually, will also be open to the public, this year focusing on German drama, and the festival's partner in programming is the Münchner Kammerspiele.
More on the first premieres of season 84:
6 September 2023
ROULETTE, directed by Jo Strømgren
This is a play for teenagers about themes relevant to this age group. Jo Strømgren's new production "Roulette" focuses on the theme of psychotropic substances and their effects, which blur the boundaries between reality and illusion. According to research, almost one-fifth of Lithuanian teenagers have tried narcotic substances and in some cases, they are even distributed and used in schools. This is a topic of real relevance for this age group. However, the performance will not declare a single, unquestionable position, but rather will seek to raise questions about the reasons behind drug use, about the freedom and responsibility of choice, about the role of reality and the illusory world in the life of a growing personality, and finally, the production will raise some very universal reflections on the times in which we live.
Actors: Kęstutis Cicėnas, Augustė Pociūtė, Rytis Saladžius, Rimantė Valiukaitė, Aistė Zabotkaitė.
21 September 2023
CONSIDER THE LOBSTER, directed by Yana Ross
Yana Ross, who has rarely staged plays in Lithuania lately and who is finishing her tenure as director of Schauspielhaus Zürich with seven other artists, will invite the audience to the premiere at LNDT's Small Hall in September.
For her new production, Yana Ross has chosen the essay "Consider the Lobster" by the American writer David Foster Wallace (1962–2008). "We hope to succeed in encouraging the audience to rethink their own ethical and moral codes and values, and at the same time to draw attention to the socially acceptable grey areas that we intend to question. Susan Sontag's important book "Regarding the Pain of Others" was also very helpful in the development of the performance," says Yana Ross.
Actors in the production: Elzė Gudavičiūtė, Martynas Nedzinskas, Salvijus Trepulis, Jūratė Vilūnaitė.
20 October 2023
SIBERIAN HAIKU, directed by Augustas Gornatkevičius
Voted the best Lithuanian children's book of 2018, Jurga Vilė and Lina Itagaki's comic book "Sibiro Haiku" (Siberian Haiku) finds a way to tell children about the atrocities of exile and its everyday life in a sensitive and unrelieved way. The play, written by Birutė Kapustinskaitė, is, like the book, centered on children's experiences and a child's perspective on exile.
The book's protagonist, little boy Algiukas, dreams of wandering the world with his friend Martynas the goose. Soon he does, but in a completely different way than he thought. In the early hours of June 1941, a regiment of soldiers throws the boy, his sister Dalia, his dad Romas, and his mum Uršulė out of their beds and tells them to get ready for their journey – this is how Lithuanians set off for Siberia in groups, not of their own accord. The child is overwhelmed with many questions: why are they being deported? What did they do wrong? Where is Siberia? The creators promise that the performance will be playful, as this makes the complex stories about Siberia lighter and more accessible to young audiences. "Siberian Haiku" is aimed at audiences aged from 8 to 12.
Actors in the production: Miglė Polikevičiūtė, Gediminas Rimeika, Jolanta Dapkūnaitė, Augustė Šimulynaitė, Marius Repšys, Lukas Malinauskas.
17 November 2023
THE BREAST OF TIRESIAS, directed by Laura Kutkaitė
For her new performance at the Small Hall, director Laura Kutkaitė takes her cue from the surrealist work "The Breasts of Teiresias" by the French poet, playwright, and novelist Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918), and constructs her text together with the actors, describing the upcoming performance as a "search for the anger of five bodies through tenderness".
"I want to immerse the audience in a choreographic dream about a blue breast, anger, tenderness, and trying to communicate between the genders, trying not to think in a binary way. That ambition comes from my rather radical feminist position. The question of how to move away from the distinction between men and women is personal, important and relevant to me. I think it is especially relevant in Lithuanian theatre, where there are still a lot of clichés in the portrayal of gender," says director Laura Kutkaitė, who reminds us that this work, like her previous works, will not be lacking in black humor.
Actors in the production: Aistė Zabotkaitė, Domantas Starkauskas, Kęstutis Cicėnas, Vitalija Mockevičiūtė, Dalia Michelevičiūtė.
26 January 2024
A PLAY FOR THE LIVING IN THE TIME OF EXTINCTION, directed by Antanas Obcarskas
This is a work about the value of life, the inevitability of death, the miracle of creation, and theories of extinction. Could it be that the climate crisis caused by industry, human activity, and various businesses has brought humanity to the brink of the sixth extinction? A mass extinction is a geological period when a large proportion of biodiversity or individual species – bacteria, fungi, plants, mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, and invertebrates – disappear from the face of the Earth. The fifth and last mass extinction occurred 65.5 million years ago when dinosaurs ceased to exist on Earth.
With the world on the brink of ecological catastrophe, we also need to rethink how theatre can operate more sustainably. For the first time in history, the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre, together with 10 other leading European theatres, is running a joint project called STAGES to develop a more sustainable theatre methodology. All the participating theatres are developing a production based on a play by American author Miranda Rose Hall, which for the first time seeks to look at environmentalism in theatre in a fundamental way rather than in a declarative and superficial way.