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 they invited me to create this number, I said, ‘All right, I’ll do it, but you should know it’ll be dark.’ They said, ‘That’s great, people like darkness.’ I said, ‘Really?’ They said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Well, let’s go.’”

For the first time, stand-up comedy comes to the theatre stage—a genre that, through laughter, offers catharsis not only to the person telling the story but also to the listener. Making someone else laugh is a genuinely difficult task. An even more difficult task for theatre, when using humour as a form of communication, is to touch on painful subjects close to us all: 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 are creating a work together for the first time. They invite audiences to explore new theatrical forms and, through a stand-up comedy routine, examine loss within a family. The characters are a Mother—a famous TV presenter—and a Son—a successful stand-up comedian. Neither is lost for words, yet after the death of the Father, communicating with each other proves 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’ attempt to communicate after the loss of their father. Dark humour, self-irony and narrative humour (stand-up) are combined here with drama, weaving together a story about loss, the mother-and-son relationship, society’s attitudes towards grief, and the resulting need to adapt,” says playwright Birutė Kapustinskaitė.

“I believe that theatre, as a public medium of communication with a broad audience, must speak not only about heroic death and sacrifice, but also about basic, demystified mental health. It must follow what is happening in society here and now, and foster empathy for people facing depression and other mental illnesses. This production is a way to speak about hope and the desire 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 production is funded by: Partner: