Photo by Indrė Bručkutė

Indrė Bručkutė (b. 1994) belongs to the youngest generation of Lithuanian playwrights. She obtained a degree in screenwriting from the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre. Indrė has been writing plays since she was a teenager. Her plays were staged at the Aušra Theatre of Klaipėda while she was still at school. During her studies, she initiated and organized the Dramokratija festival along with her colleagues and her tutor, Gabriele Labanauskaite-Diena, where her first professional plays were read – Vizitinės kortelės žmogus (Business Card Man) and Anoniminė šalis (Anonymous Country). In 2018, she worked as a playwright on Vieniši (Lonely), an adaptation of Gerhart Hauptmann’s play Lonely Lives at the Russian Drama Theatre of Lithuania (directed by Augustas Gornatkevičius). 

The play Hotel universalis (2019), staged at the Juozas Miltinis Drama Theatre of Panevėžys (directed by Augustas Gornatkevičius), is based on the ancient myth of Phaethon, the son of the solar deity Helios and the Oceanid Clymene, who was challenged to prove his divine origins by his friends and tried to drive Helios’s sun chariot, but didn’t manage to control Helios’s horses. Phaethon died in flames, having almost set the Earth on fire, while his body fell into the river Eridanos.