The first source of this story was an advertisement read in a shopping center. It contained the names, surnames, dates of birth and death of several dozen people. Next to it is an invitation to respond to relatives and friends who could collect the urn and bury it.
Every year, the Vilnius municipality and companies providing funeral services organize the funerals of about one hundred single people, in Panevėžys there are up to ten such cases per year. These are people who died in hospitals, in their homes or on the street, whose relatives refuse to bury them, or, due to broken relationships, they learn about the death later, for example, after returning from emigration or prison. Often, no one misses these dead people or looks for them, on the contrary, the police and municipal employees try to find their relatives and inform them of the fact of death, asking them to bury the dead person, or they do not find them, or they hear the reason for the refusal. There are cases when the police fail to establish the identity of a person, no one comes forward about his death, so after a while a sign appears in the cemetery with the inscription - "Grave of an unknown person". Single and unidentified people are buried in Šilaičiai civil cemetery in Panevėžys, and in Karveliškiu cemetery in Vilnius. Every year, in addition to their relatives, several babies who did not yet have a name, only a surname, are buried here.
The team of the play "Laukys" does not create social or documentary theater, does not tell the story of a specific person. The funeral of single people is perceived here as a cultural and philosophical topic, as a question for the living. According to the creators, this is an artistic attempt to think about loneliness, death and constant waiting as a theme for each of us without dramatizing, judging anyone and without looking for unequivocal answers.
The project is financed by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania.
