Creator of a stage language all his own, the 26-year-old Albanian-born Mario Banushi is already touring the world with his first plays, “Goodbye, Lindita” (2023) and “Taverna Miresia—Mario, Bella, Anastasia” (2023), and is hailed internationally as the wunderkind of Greek theater. If, in his previous works, the theme was mourning, in “MAMI” it is the source of life. For in Banushi’s personal mythology, the almost homonymous words “mami” and “mam” become identical. Mami, as in mother. Mam, as in food. One pulls out one’s heart and offers it to another like a warm loaf of bread.
Drawing inspiration from personal experiences, Banushi creates an unholy shrine to the mother-child relationship. To celebrate it. To exorcise it. To fill it with vows and curses. To fall in love with it. For, as he himself notes, “I have always said that birth is love in reverse.”
The stage becomes a landscape of memory. As eerie as it is familiar. The performers, immersed in silence, create moments of profound emotion and urge us to recognize and confront our own memories, our own relationships, and the emotional legacy we carry.
This breakout director’s new creation is a visual poem about the mother-child relationship. A show that is a tribute to the women who nurtured us.
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