“Sleepers” is a symbolical introduction of Oskaras Koršunovas, the new artistic director of the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre, and Marius Ivaškevičius, the new playwright, to the theatre audience. This play by the recipients of the National Prize for Culture and Art have premiered in reconstructed New Stage of the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre in November.

Marius Ivaškevičius’s futuristic dystopia sounds particularly relevant in the current times of a virus affecting the whole world. As people surviving a pandemic emerge from the lockdown that has paralysed their lives, the themes of The Sleepers are expected to be as resonant, understandable, and intriguing as ever.

The play takes the audience to Moscow of 2109. An electronic alarm clock signals the start of the wakeful cycle of the Second Shift. Three sisters – Nastia, Maya, and Maria – crawl out of their thermoses one after the other, steaming and sleepy. For ten years, they have hibernated in the state of anabiosis and are finding it difficult to orient themselves in space and time; they are moving painfully due to muscular atrophy and still drifting between dreams and reality. It will take some time for them to come to grips with reality.

All this started many years ago, in the 2030s. As global warming and overpopulation of the planet led to a shortage of fresh water and food resources, two World Water Wars followed one another. The ensuing migration of billions of refugees brought a definitive end to the old world order: states, alliances, unions, and their borders.

Discoveries in genetics helped to resolve the problem of overpopulation: half of humanity was sent to a decade-long hibernation and thus the life in shifts began. Every ten years, the shifts change; the wakeful arouse the sleepers and drift into slumber themselves. Unfortunately, the two shifts have radically different values and attitudes towards the governance and the future of the world...