Things I Didn’t Dare Say, and Now It’s Too Late

In 2010, Itaru Sasaki, from the town of Otsuchi in Japan, learned that his beloved cousin was terminally ill and had only three months to live. After his cousin died, Sasaki installed an old telephone booth in his garden so he could speak to the deceased every day and let his words be carried away by the wind. In 2011, a tsunami struck the Otsuchi area, killing 10 percent of the town’s residents. Gradually, people heard about the telephone booth and began visiting Itaru Sasaki’s garden to call their lost loved ones.

Since 1 March 2022, an old payphone identical to the “telephone of the wind” in Japan has stood outside the Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet Theatre. People were invited to stop by and “call” those to whom they had not managed to say what they wanted in time, and now it was too late. Over more than six months, the receiver was picked up around 4,000 times. Audio recordings of all the authentic stories became the basis for the opera’s libretto.

The payphone opera “Things I Didn’t Dare Say, and Now It’s Too Late” is a tender, subtle, luminous and hopeful story about a person in mourning. At the same time, it is a clear cross-section through the territories grief opens up, a journey towards encounter, reconciliation and experiencing the world as a whole.

The creators on the performance:

“The payphone opera is a poem to human transience. On stage, subtle, human and sometimes humorous images from this side and the other emerge: bodies and objects appear and disappear in the chiaroscuro. Everything passes—people, time, places, things, events.”
—Kamilė Gudmonaitė, director and dramaturg

“My relationship with the work—or, more precisely, with the recordings of passers-by’s ‘calls’ left at the payphone—kept changing. At every stage of the long creative process, I discovered a different way of looking at what each person said in the booth. At first, I listened as if from the outside to these very open statements; now I reconsider them by putting myself in the callers’ or their addressees’ place. This opera posed considerable challenges: how can we create the inner soundscape of each of us, and how can we bring the often deeply sensitive, subtle content of the calls—the sacredness of being—onto the theatre stage? Here, music and sound become an invisible medium, an energy that travels and speaks of what we did not dare say, and now it is too late.”
—Dominykas Digimas, composer

“The set design for this work is an in-between space, like a reflection of the inner world, a meeting in which a relationship with the afterlife can be felt. The action takes place in a transitional space that brings liminal states into focus, where everyday life intertwines with transience and uncertainty. The work’s visual atmosphere is dedicated to life and death, closeness and longing.”
—Barbora Šulniūtė, scenographer and author of the video-projection concept

Performance producers:
Partners:
Funded by: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania, Lithuanian Council for Culture, Vilnius City Municipality

The work began development in 2021 as part of “Operos genomas” (“Opera Genome”), a joint project of LNOBT and Operomanija.