The field of Lithuanian drama has undergone significant changes in recent decades. While 20th century drama was dominated by male names and the search for historical or political narratives, the 21st century has seen an increasingly strong female voice, characterized by a different sensitivity, intimacy, but also critical reflection on social phenomena. Women playwrights are opening up topics that have long been marginalized — the fragility of everyday life, the female body and its social status, the paradoxes of family and love, as well as reflections of collective traumas and global challenges. Their work combines poetry, documentary, social criticism, intimate psychologism, and experimental forms.
The readings presented at Romaeuropa festival by no means will give a broad overview of Lithuanian dramaturgy, but it will boldly introduce significant names in contemporary writing for theatre in Lithuania, and hopefully will spark interest of professionals as well as general audiences in the dramaturgy that is being born in a small yet brave country, written in one of the most archaic languages in Europe.
During the readings extracts of three plays will be presented as stage readings:
– A Stand-up for Meaning and Meaninglessness by Birute Kapustinskaite
– Real Estate Drama by Gabriele Labanauskaite
– Patina by Virginija Rimkaite
Plays are being translated by Toma Gudelyte.
Birut? Kapustinskaite’s dramaturgy may seem to be just a verbal and physical outline for the actors, a certain space for the directorial and acting plan to be implemented. In other words, for Birute the play is not just a finished text, but rather a certain direction in which she suggests the entire theatre team should move. Birut? Kapustinskait? stands out as a representative of contemporary, critical dramaturgy. Her work has strong elements of documentary and social theater — she writes about generational relationships, collective memory, mental health, and other topics that rarely made it to the stage in the past.
Gabriele Labanauskaite is one of the most prominent representatives of queer and feminist dramaturgy in Lithuania. She combines theatre with performance, writes texts that deconstruct norms, and invites for collective experiences. She often combines performativity, queer themes, and feminist perspectives in her work. In her work, Gabriel? expands the boundaries of theater, and invites us to rethink the concepts of sexuality, identity, and community. Her dramaturgy not only represents marginalized voices, but also recreates the language of theatre itself — it is interdisciplinary and close to contemporary performance art practices.
Virginija Rimkaite represents the field of poetic dramaturgy. Her works reveal an analysis of language as material, fragmentation, and immediacy. In Rimkaite’s dramaturgy, not only the narrative is important, but also the structure of language itself, its musicality and rhythm. She explores how theatrical language can express physicality, female experience, fragility, and desire.
