The story line of "The Night Before" was dictated by the short story "The Night Before Christmas" by the Ukrainian-born Russian writer Nikolai Gogol (1809 - 1852) (from the collection "Evenings in a Single Seat at Dikanka"). In the epicenter of the play, in Ukraine, in the village of Dikanka, before the big holidays of the year, the love that flared up between the boyfriend Vakula and the vivacious beauty Oksana. The action of "The Night Before" is transferred to a crazy and passionate party taking place nowadays, where all the atmosphere and magic of N. Gogol's work are revealed, the characters shine with new colors. Extravagant characters, imposing costumes designed by Daiva Urbonavičiūtė, and Vitaly Strigunkov's scenography is open - without scenes behind which you could hide... The color of the play is enhanced by Ukrainian folklore and humor. The show is also atmospherically reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick's film "Eyes Wide Shut" or Andrew Miksys's series of photographs "Disco"... When does the game stop and end? Where is the line between holiness and sin? Is the purification that the night resists possible? What else? The party just keeps going.

Director Žilvinas Beniushis: "The theme of free will and destiny is developed in Gogol's work. The world is seen as one big playground. In the play, we ask the questions, do we stop playing at all, or are love and death just part of this great game? The characters of the play gather at night for a party where a festive scene has been prepared. In it, emotions and desires reach the maximum spiritual and psychological tension... Driven by passion and the desire to perform, the characters take the stage, the plot and intrigues unfold in front of our eyes, which are shown through a magnifying glass with the instruments of clowning. Gogol's characters and we, the audience, expect a happy finale, as if making a kind of confession."
Žilvinas Beniušis - director, actor, lecturer at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theater, founder of the Contemporary Intellectual Clown Theater, organization "Red Noses. Doctor Clowns" an educational guide and a clown. In the performance, the director aims to make maximum use of the genre of modern clowning, the expression of physical and playful theater.

Alexander Pushkin in 1831 wrote in a letter to Aleksandr Vojeikov: "I have just read "West in a Single Seat at Dikanka". I was blown away. That's where real fun is: sincere, unrestrained, without frills, without sanctimoniousness. And what poetry! All this is so unusual in our literature that I still haven't repented. I was told that the editors of Gogol's text at the publishing house burst out laughing while working on his book. Molière, Fielding would probably have been happy to make their publishers laugh."

The show is shown in Russian with Lithuanian subtitles