Photo by Irmantas Gelūnas

The poet, journalist and playwright Mindaugas Nastaravičius (b. 1984) graduated in journalism and literature. His first plays, Paukštyno bendrabutis (The Dormitory of the Poultry-Farm, 2012) and Kita mokykla (The Other School) were written in collaboration with the director Valentinas Masalskis and Klaipėda Youth Theatre. Although his background was not related to theatre, Nastaravičius had a strong desire to get to know the rules of the stage. Therefore, the structure and topics of his plays are very varied: they often reflect not so much his own style and his usual topics (even though his characteristic humour is retained) as the style of the director he is working with. The author has recently been successfully collaborating with the director Yana Ross, writing for her adaptations of Three Sisters (based on the play by Anton Chekhov) and Tales from the Vienna Woods (based on the play by Ödön von Horváth). 

The author’s third play, Demokratija (Democracy, 2013), is a grotesque story about the residents of an apartment building who are irritated by recurring power outages. The neighbours arrange a meeting and realize the reason behind this problem – the electrical system is infested with rodents. The residents establish a tenants’ association and contemplate possible ways of “taking care of things”. They finally decide that it is not just rodents that need to be exterminated… In 2013, this creative work was presented at the Versmė national drama festival. That year, the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre invited three young playwrights and commissioned each of them to write a play on the topic “You are beautiful, my dear homeland”. Nastaravičius worked on this with the director Paulius Ignatavičius from the very beginning. Their play has been a part of the theatre repertoire for a long time.