The State Youth Theatre is delighted to invite you to the new theatre season. The audience can expect four intriguing big stage premieres, bold experiments by young directors, a special focus on dramaturgy and its different interpretations.
The Youth Theatre is starting to distribute tickets for autumn performances, and is preparing for the upcoming theatre season with a new approach to the audience, repertoire and communication.
“The motto of our new season is “Creating Experience”. We live in a time when the rush to capture images does not allow us to experience what they depict. Experience requires time and concentration. The Youth Theatre invites you to feel the meaning of time spent at the theatre in its performances, to experience it’s value and the reality that is visible beyond images,” says Audronis Liuga, the General Manager of the Youth Theatre.
In its 62nd season, the Youth Theatre turns it’s focus on dramaturgy and is preparing an entire bouquet of its interpretations for the audience: from Ancient Greek tragedy, 20th century classics to contemporary plays by foreign and Lithuanian authors.
The theatre will open the season in September with the premiere of Sophocles’ tragedy “Philoctetes” directed by Cezars Graužinis. C. Graužinis himself will not only present his work to the Lithuanian audience for the first time after a break of more than ten years, but will also play the main role of Philoctetes. According to C. Graužinis, “this astonishingly modern, psychologically suggestive and self-identity-provoking tragedy gives us the opportunity to rediscover the beauty of human critical thinking and the power of compassion. Sophocles invites us to think that the greatest art that we are doomed to learn is the art of overcoming the conflict between the individual and the community.”
In November, the audience will be presented an intriguing premiere of Witold Gombrowicz’s play “The Marriage” directed by Adam Juška on the main stage. A. Juška, who began his creative path at the Youth Theatre, is one of the leading young theatre directors in Lithuania. Now he returns to the Youth Theatre with an ambitious creative project – to create a different stage version of this play than his teacher Eimuntas Nekrošius’s last production of “The Marriage” at the Teatr Narodowy in Warsaw.
In January 2027, one of the most prominent contemporary Estonian directors, Hendrik Toompere Jr., will work in Lithuania for the first time. Together with Lithuanian actors, he will create a new staging of Marius Ivaškevičius’s play “Totalitarian Novel”. According to the playwright, his play is “a kind of theatrical revenge on totalitarian regimes that strangle any manifestations of free speech in their countries”.
The season will culminate with the premiere of Ignas Jonynas’s new play “The Hole”. In the text the director develops the themes of his previous performance “The Son” (play by F. Zeller), giving them a new context, genre form and psychological depth. The relationship between a family in crisis is being analyzed here in order to understand the deep patterns that repeat from generation to generation.
In the Small Stage this season we will continue our collaboration with different creatively promising theatre artists, aiming to jointly implement their innovative creative ideas. In December of this year and next spring, the theatre will invite the audience to get acquainted with the final works of four directing students from the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre (course leader Árpád Schilling), created in collaboration with the actors of the Youth Theatre. Also, in early February, the Small Stage will see the light of day with a performance directed by Darius Gumauskas based on Brian Friel’s play “Molly Sweeney”, coproduced with the NGO “Darbininkai”.
We look forward to seeing you at the Youth Theatre!