2020-2021 season

Lately, we’ve been witnessing our reality transform into some kind of dystopia – what we have seen in not the best quality Hollywood movies has suddenly become our daily life. In a paranoid manner, we disinfect everything around us, avoid contact with other people, and get involved in hybrid wars and conspiracy theories.

The worst consequence of this dystopian reality is suspicion. We don’t trust others because we don’t know where the invisible enemy is. We do not trust politicians, forecasts, shops, neighbors, the media, airlines, hospitals, foreign countries. We preemptively assume that danger is everywhere, and, as we know, caution is the parent of safety.

Guided by this type of thinking, we keep working out plans A, B and C, although we may never use any of them. It is like the state of zero gravity, when the plans and the circumstances that destroy them neutralize each other and no longer affect our lives. So we are forced to live in uncertainty – being constantly afraid that the virus might attack from ambush – via our relatives, neighbors, colleagues, passers-by.

Today, when planning the LNDT autumn repertoire, we have a whole bunch of unknown quantities and almost nothing real. Will theaters open their doors? How far will the spectators have to sit from each other and how many of them can we accommodate? Will there be enough funding? Will the virus return? Will I get infected while sitting in a theater auditorium?

However, we must keep our common sense and our trust in other people. Only this way will we reduce the uncertainty and restore the fragile balance between the opposite forces that will allow us to get out of this state of zero gravity. This season, when the reconstruction has closed all the doors of the LNDT, the theater is working on ten premieres. As many as two of them belong to world-famous directors: Jan Fabre (Belgium) and the play Night Writer based on his diaries and Grzegorz Jarzyna (Poland) and his play Solaris based on the novel by Stanisław Lem. We will begin the autumn with the play Republic, an ambitious production of director Łukasz Twarkowski (Poland), and end it with the production of August Strindberg’s play The Great Highway, directed by Jonas Vaitkus. We also look forward to presenting the audience with new projects by young theater makers, among them Antanas Obcarskas, Motiejus Ivanauskas, Karolis Vilkas, Kamilė Gudmonaitė, and Mantas Jančiauskas.

As Umberto Eco wrote, possibly quoting Saul Below, “In times of insanity, believing that you are resistant to insanity is a form of insanity. So, do not take what you have read here for granted.” After all, it is quite possible that we will meet at other premieres than the above-mentioned ones.

Martynas Budraitis

Director General of the Lithuanian National Drama Theater