Birutė Kapustinskaitė: Stand-Up for Meaning and Meaninglessness

◊ 2024 Golden Stage Cross. Best Actress – Vitalija Mockevičiūtė ◊ 2024 Golden Stage Cross. Best Playwriting – Birutė Kapustinskaitė
“When I was invited to create this number, I said, ‘All right, I’ll do it, but you should know it’ll be dark.’ They said, ‘That’s very good; people like darkness.’ I said, ‘Really?’ They said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Well, let’s go.’”

For the first time, stand-up comedy comes to the theatre stage—a genre that, through laughter, purifies not only the person telling the story but also the person listening. Making someone else laugh is truly no easy task. An even harder task, when theatre uses humour as a form of communication, is to touch on painful subjects close to all of us: grief, loss and suicide. To stir something unexpected in a person, help them laugh at themselves and look at painful experiences from the outside, so they can come to terms with them.

Playwright Birutė Kapustinskaitė and director Eglė Švedkauskaitė, collaborating for the first time, invite audiences to explore new theatrical forms and examine a family’s loss through a stand-up comedy routine. The play’s characters are a Mother—a famous TV presenter—and a Son—a successful stand-up comedian. Neither is lost for words, yet after the loss of the Father, communicating with each other becomes difficult. This is a story about letting go of anger, shame and guilt, and searching for ways to open up to vulnerability and to one another.

“‘Stand-Up for Meaning and Meaninglessness’ is a comic play about the main characters’ attempts to communicate after the loss of their father. Dark humour, self-irony and narrative humour (stand-up) are combined with drama, weaving together a story of loss, of a mother and son’s relationship with society’s attitudes towards grief, and of the resulting need to adapt,” says playwright Birutė Kapustinskaitė.

“I believe theatre, as a public means of communication with a broad audience, should speak not only about heroic death and sacrifice, but also about basic, demystified mental health. It should follow what is happening in society here and now, and foster empathy for people facing depression and other mental illnesses. This performance is a way to speak about hope and the will to live, even when it seems you don’t know how,” says director Eglė Švedkauskaitė.

The production was also funded by the European Union’s Creative Europe programme. The performance is funded by: Partner: