The Mammoth Hunt

International Premiere. It is 1968 in Lithuania, a time when nobody could foresee the collapse of the communist regime twenty one years later. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t dissent. That year, the highly praised theater director Jonas Jurasas directed a scandalous, avant-garde, allegorical and thinly-veiled anti-Soviet production entitled “The Mammoth Hunt”. The performance played to packed houses, word got back to Moscow, and the performance was condemned as anti-Soviet and was abolished from the repertoire that ultimately led to Jarasas and his family to leave the country for America (and eventually to Sarasota) to continue his stellar career. Nobody expected the performance to be revived, but two months later a closed cast locked themselves in the theater and filmed the play. In The Mammoth Hunt Aistė Stonytė attempts to track down that film and along the way gathers recollections from a number of surviving participants, follows Jurasas’ new life in the US and his return to Lithuania to witness a new country in the post-Soviet world. Stonytė tells an incredible story of creativity, bravery, spying and the life of a talented, committed theater director.

In Attendance: Jonas Jurasas; Aistė Stonytė, Director