"When I was asked to do this issue, I said, okay, I'll do it, but you know, it's going to be dark. They said, that's very good, people like the dark. I said, right? I said, yeah. I said, well, let's go."
For the first time on the theatre stage, stand-up comedy is a genre that not only cleanses the storyteller through laughter, but also the listener. Making another person laugh is a truly difficult task. And the even more difficult task, which is a concern for theatre using humour as a form of communication, is to touch on the painful themes of mourning, bereavement and suicide, which are close to us all. To stir something unexpected in a person, to help you laugh at yourself, to look at painful experiences from the side so that you can come to terms with them.
Birutė Kapustinskaitė, the author of the play, and director Eglė Švedkauskaitė, who are creating it together for the first time, invite the audience to travel together into new theatrical forms and to explore loss in the family in one number of a stand-up comedy.
The characters of the play - Mother, a famous TV presenter, and Son, a successful stand-up performer - are not looking for a word in their pockets, but when faced with the loss of their father, it becomes difficult for them to communicate. It is a story about letting go of anger, shame, guilt and finding ways to open up to vulnerability and to each other.
Stand-up for Meaning and Meaninglessness is a comic play about the protagonists' attempts to communicate after the loss of their father. It combines black humour, self-irony and narrative humour (stand-up) with drama, weaving together a story about loss, about the relationship between mother and son, with the societal attitudes towards mourning and the resulting need to adapt," says the play's author Birutė Kapustinskaitė.
"I believe that theatre, as a public communication tool with a wide audience, should not only talk about heroic death and sacrifice, but also about basic, unmedicated mental health, it should keep track of what is going on in society in the here-and-now, and it should cultivate empathy for people dealing with depression and other mental illnesses. This play is a way to talk about hope and the will to live, even when you don't seem to know how to do it", - director Eglė Švedkauskaitė.
