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

In 2010, Itaru Sasaki, from the Japanese town of Otsuchi, learned that his beloved cousin was terminally ill and had only three months to live. After his cousin died, Sasaki placed 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 learned about the telephone booth and began visiting Itaru Sasaki’s garden to call their lost loved ones. From 1 March 2022, an old payphone, identical to the “wind phone” in Japan, was installed outside the Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet Theatre. People were invited to stop by and “call” those they had not had time to say what they wanted to before it was too late. In more than six months, the phone 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 to Say, and Now It’s Too Late” is a tender, subtle, bright and hopeful story about a person in mourning. At the same time, it is a clear cross-section of the geographical territories opened up by grief, a journey towards encounter, reconciliation and experiencing the world as a whole.

The creators on the production:

The payphone opera is a poem about human transience. On stage, subtle, humane and sometimes witty images from this world and the next are created: bodies and objects appear and disappear in the half-light. Everything passes—people, time, places, things, events.

Director and dramaturg Kamilė Gudmonaitė

My relationship with the work—or, more precisely, with the recordings of passers-by’s “calls” left in the payphone—has constantly changed. At every stage of the long creative process, I discovered a different way of looking at what each person had said in the booth. At first, I listened from the sidelines to these very open confessions; 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 and subtle content of the calls—the sacredness of being—onto the theatre stage? Here, music and sound become an invisible medium, an energy that flows and speaks of what we did not dare to say, and now it is too late.

Composer Dominykas Digimas

The set of this work is an in-between space, like a reflection of the inner world, a meeting in which a relationship with the beyond can be felt. The action takes place in a transitional space that highlights liminal states, where everyday life interweaves with transience and uncertainty. The visual atmosphere of the work is dedicated to life and death, closeness and longing.

Set designer and author of the video projection concept Barbora Šulniūtė

Production producers: Partners: The production is funded by: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania, Lithuanian Council for Culture, Vilnius City Municipality.

The work began development in 2021 in the context of “Opera Genome”, a joint project of LNOBT and Operomanija.