kÆRU VINIR
Tjarnarbíó theater, Reykjavík
June, 2019
"Dear friends" is a post-dramatic examination about identity in the age of late-capitalism, climate change, and #winning. Seven characters find themselves stuck on a piece of old office carpet and mumble snippets of monologues and stories without any obvious meaning or purpose. Sometimes they sing church hymns you would usually hear at funerals; sometimes they let time pass by playing old kindergarten games. Time moves slower and slower, but the problems grow bigger and bigger: The office plant is dead, the water-cooler is empty, and the lights are breaking. But why don’t they leave?
The play, set in the aesthetic image of the modern office with soundscape and music borrowed from church hymns and altar-tunes, asks questions about values, beliefs, and identity. What happens when all your principles are proven wrong? What do you do when the world you live in no longer exists, or more precisely, can no longer exist. The piece is deeply rooted in the absurdist literature themes of meaninglessness, slapstick, and humor and is a dramaturgical research in what "new-absurdism "can reveal about the present times like they did in the past with the post-war works of Beckett and Ionéscó.
Performed in Icelandic
