It wasn't easy for the National Theatre of Lithuania to come to Chicago to perform in the recent International Theatre Festival. Some thirty actors plus a support staff of twenty had struggled for days to get the requisite visas to present two of their most popular productions at the festival. Arrangements had been made months in advance, but at the last moment all that could be seen were large crates sitting on the empty stage of the Blackstone Theatre. The actors were stranded in Lithuania, and the opening performance as well as the following night had to be cancelled.
The actors finally arrived exhausted, but within twenty-four hours were ready to take their Chicago audience on a theatrical journey brilliant in its conception, overwhelming in its execution.
The National Theatre of Lithuania was founded twenty-five years ago. It has a working company of forty-five actors, some of whom have been there since its inception. Its support staff of technicians, designers, and administrative staff is equally large. Currently they have seventeen plays in their repertoire. What this means is that at any given time they can, and do, produce a different play every night, putting on tried and true comedies or testing the mettle of their audience with complex plays about the politics of suffering. Over recent years the company has achieved a deserved reputation for the creation of a new style of theater. When its existence was a virtual state secret and visitors were rare, those who returned to the West talked of astonishing images and a dazzling verity. Arthur Miller, for example, said that the company performs, "some of the best theater I've seen anywhere."
Artistic Explosion
The driving force behind this artistic explosion is Eimuntas Nekrosius, a brooding, intense, almost-sullen man, who has brought his private vision as well as his nightmares onto the national and international stage. In an interview he told me that a great deal of what drives him in theater is a passion for human truth. A graduate of the Moscow Dramatic Arts Institute, he was taught, and still adheres to, the Stanislavskian ideal of the inner human truthfulness of the actor and the external means of expressing these truths based on critically accurate observations of human behavior. But this concern with the real, the natural, in some sense stops here. For Nekrosius, the stage is an open arena to be filled with images that make concrete the abstract, make real the metaphorical, and play upon the heart.
The Square, presented on a virtually bare stage, is a play developed by Nekrosius from a newspaper clipping. There are two main characters, He and She. She is a young graduate of the Pedagogical Institute who on graduation day reads aloud some poems on the radio. He is a nameless prisoner, lost in the labyrinths of the gulag. He has fashioned a primitive radio from a tin can and wire which he has attached to a telephone pole. Hearing her voice, He falls in love with She. They exchange letters, She comes to visit him in the prison, but since nothing is permitted, love cannot be permitted. Finally He is free is leave and can experience freedom, but when He steps out of his cell He finds there is no freedom. Everything is still dictated by the state.
What marks this production, what gives it greatness is not this almost commonplace theme, but the glorious
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