Scenes from an artificially lit dark world
EIN ELEFANT is a play about a child's encounter with death, about which no one has told him anything. Not speaking here is a way of existing and surviving in a world that is too dark to be verbalized. This is about a child and his life in the company of an "elephant". And the "elephant" is symbolically called a modern disease - depression. Director Tadas Montrim emphasizes that depression is not just sadness or a bad mood. It's a disease that many of us tend not to see - in other words, to live with the "elephant" in the room and pretend it's not there. The show will provide clues on how to recognize this insidious disease and feel when a dangerous line has already been crossed, when you should be concerned and take action, measures that help you recognize this disease and finally - deal with it - see the elephant in the room and not walk around it, but to try to clean up, get organized and move on with life. On the other hand, there are all kinds of "elephants" - it's not only depression, but also dislike, addictions, poverty, isolation - "elephant" can be called everything that is difficult to talk about, that you want not to see, to avoid. Art here becomes a language to talk about complex, even medical things, and no matter how difficult it is, the play reveals these themes through humor, without being afraid to make fun of itself. "It is our responsibility as adults in the family to set a positive example for our children and not allow the 'elephant' to overshadow relationships and bright childhoods, and ultimately to prevent this 'elephant' from affecting our children's lives and future." We can't lay our hands on it - we have to feel responsible for future generations," says the director. T. Montrim.
Dovilė Zavedskaitė: I wrote "The Elephant" or "Ein Elefant" several years ago, but I still feel a special connection with this play. There is a lot of irony in the play, an attempt to entertain and artificially lighten the dark world. In the context of today's events - the pandemic, the war - the work acquired a new perspective: we all now resemble children afraid of an unpredictable elephant. And the writing was inspired by an autobiographical encounter with the phenomenon of depression and suicide. After going through this in silence, I wanted to start talking about it out loud, so that we all stop being silent in all this silence. But I wrote the play easily - like music, it already lived in me.
Tadas Montrim: "Ein Elefant" is my first creative journey with the Vilnius Small Theater. Journey is not an accidental word here: for me, every work in the theater is like a new expedition to the worlds of others, and at the same time to myself. "Ein Elefant" gave me a somewhat frightening but very important realization of how pathetically little we really know even the people closest to us, and how we make mistakes every time we sincerely say "I understand you!" to someone. Without realizing it, we know much less about others than they would like us to: in fact, we only know a drop from each of the bottomless oceans of thoughts and feelings in our heads.
