In 2010, Itaru Sasaki from the town of Otsuchi in Japan learned that his beloved cousin was terminally ill and had only three months to live. After his cousin’s death, Sasaki built an old telephone booth in his yard so that he could talk to the deceased every day and his words would be carried away by the wind.
In 2011, a tsunami struck the Otsuchi area, killing ten percent of the city’s population. Gradually, people became aware of the telephone booth and started visiting Itaru Sasaki’s garden to call their lost loved ones.
On March 1, 2022, an old telephone booth, identical to the “wind phone” built in Japan, was installed next to the Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet Theatre. People were invited to come by and “call” those to whom they did not have time to say what they wanted to say, and it was too late now. In over six months, the phone was picked up about 4,000 times. Audio recordings of all the authentic stories became the basis for the opera libretto.
The telephone booth opera Things I Didn’t Dare to Say, and It’s Too Late Now is a sensitive, subtle, bright and hopeful story about a grieving person. At the same time, it is a clear cut through the geographical territories opened up by grief, a journey towards encounter, reconciliation and the experience of the world as a whole.
The telephone booth opera is a poem to human transience. The stage is filled with subtle, human and sometimes witty images from the present and beyond: bodies and objects emerge and fade in the interplay of light and dark. Everything passes – people, time, places, objects, events.
Director and dramaturge Kamilė Gudmonaitė
My relationship with the work, or rather, with the recordings of the ‘calls’ made by strangers in the telephone booth, was constantly changing. With every phase of the lengthy creative process, I found a new perspective on what each person had said. Initially, it was as if I was an outsider listening to these deeply personal stories; now, I reimagine them by placing myself in the shoes of the callers or their recipients. This opera presented a significant challenge: how to convey the inner soundscape within each of us, how to translate the often delicate and subtle content of the calls – the sacred essence – onto the theatrical stage? Music and sound become an invisible conduit, a spreading energy, bearing witness to what we never dared to express and now find ourselves too late to voice.
Composer Dominykas Digimas
The scenography of this piece embodies an intermediary realm, resembling a mirror to the inner world – an encounter that evokes a connection to the beyond. The action takes place in a transitional space that highlights liminal conditions, where everyday life converges with the transient and the uncertain. The visual atmosphere of the work pays homage to life and death, intimacy and yearning.
Set designer and author of video projection concept Barbora Šulniūtė
The precise, harmonious world of this work, obeying the rules of art, allows the documentary content to resonate sensitively, not blandly, and to open up its truth and sincerity.
Ieva Tumanovičiūtė, 7 meno dienos
We identify with what we hear as if we were the ones uttering the monologues. There is no acting, pretence, or artistic embellishment in the recorded excerpts. Those voices convey genuine emotions—grief, hope, love, and remorse.
Jelena Novak, Sound Stage Screen
The cosy serenity of the performance is first of all created by the music of Dominykas Digimas – meditative, gentle, caressing, leading throughout the opera towards the hope sung by the performers: we are fine.
Aušra Kaminskaitė, 15min.lt
A large creative team has produced an aesthetically clean and sophisticated piece of stage work. <…> Things I Didn’t Dare to Say, and It’s Too Late Now captivates with its honesty. <…> The sequence of the scenes may seem a bit random, but the performance does not strive for a coherent narrative, instead obeying the score of emotions and atmospheres.
Ramunė Balevičiūtė, Verslo žinios
For the authors of the opera, the telephone booth has become like a prompt box or Charon, carrying the words over Styx, perhaps into Lethe. <…> Here the creators themselves took on a kind of ferryman’s role. First of all, that is how Kamilė Gudmonaitė’s dramaturgy and direction, aimed at the audience’s empathy and fully relying on it, work. This is the strategy of a very spectator-friendly performance.
Rima Jūraitė, menufaktura.lt
I use the epithet “spectatorial” for the piece Things I Didn’t Dare to Say, and It’s Too Late Now by director and playwright Kamilė Gudmonaitė to define its most important, decisive characteristic. <…> It is obvious: the play-opera purports to have a therapeutic function for the whole audience.
Marijus Gailius, Literatūra ir menas
I tend to think that the best expression of the director’s intentions in this opera comes from the really richly nuanced, delicately performed music written by the young composer Dominykas Digimas.
Audronė Girdzijauskaitė, Šiaurės Atėnai
Everything that affects the viewer in visual form in this performance is a deliberate great beauty, serving as a contrast to the claustrophobic feeling of the actual telephone booth, where the real creators of this performance, the people from the street, were speaking.
Dovilė Zavedskaitė, menufaktura.lt