Kazys Binkis ATŽALYNAS, dir. Jonas VAITKUS

In the words of director Jonas Vaitkus, this work can become a spring rain in today's theater – which has turned away from fundamental values and is leaning towards destruction and negation. To perform in the play, the director invited not only experienced actors but also students from the acting course he leads at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre. "Atžalynas", interpreted by such an enthusiastic creative team, is a great opportunity to rediscover classic Lithuanian dramaturgy.

"While writing this work, I deceived the theater a little in the sense that the work turned out to be for young people, whose concept of age is very broad – roughly from 12 to 60 years old and more." (Kazys Binkis)

Director Jonas Vaitkus: Today there is a sense in returning to certain things in which the spirit of values has remained. From our point of view, it may seem simple, overly sincere, primitively sentimental, but behind the words spoken in this work, there is some kind of radiance. I want to return to the purity that is in "Atžalynas". But there is also a destructive element in this material. It is touched upon very slightly in this play, but it shows what the "progress" of progress and anti-progress – technical progress and spiritual anti-progress – is like, and that is exactly what we are seeing now. These "scissors" show that those hints of destructiveness have flourished so much now that "Atžalynas" on stage today can be like a spring rain. In this production, I strive for documentary quality, and from the actors – for inner feeling. It is important that they have clear attitudes, a worldview, and the ability to seriously delve into a person – not a complicated, broken, scattered, crushed one who does not understand himself and lives by instincts between money and emotional passions, but a person who has hope, a perspective, and who believes that human life is the greatest value. Only then, looking at life – from birth to the last breath – do you begin to realize how late, how too late people understand all this: they are afraid to live, to feel, and to take responsibility for their lives. As I read this pure "poem" – which is what "Atžalynas" is – these things become necessary: both for us and for the people who work on this play.