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 learned about 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.
Telephone booth opera is a poem about the transience of human life. The stage is filled with subtle, human, and sometimes humorous images from this and outer world: bodies and objects emerge and fade in the interplay of light and dark. Everything passes—people, time, places, things, events. I remember a woman staying behind in the auditorium after one performance. She stopped me as I was passing by the stage, asked if I was the director of the performance, and shared that one of the recordings from this opera belonged to her daughter. In it, she talks about her father, who passed away many years ago. Her daughter had given her the tickets to the performance and asked her to go to the opera alone. “Now I understand”, she said, “how hard my daughter really mourned her father. And I didn’t know anything about it; she just grew up. We didn’t talk about it”. With tears in her eyes, she thanked me for this work. Then I realized that the performance lives its own life and touches people beyond aesthetic perception, because it captures real experiences. Everyone, both here and beyond, is talking; but it is here that something can still be changed.
Director and dramaturge Kamilė Gudmonaitė
Over time, your relationship with a piece changes. Sometimes you put everything you have into it and then let it live its own life, but we keep coming back to the telephone booth opera, like stoking a fire to keep it burning. The music playing in the hall takes us back to the time when this work was created, but more than that, it also moves us to the space where the voices of the opera live, sharing their experiences, and opening their hearts. It seems that I keep coming to visit them as a guest. The music and sound here are a kind of an invisible medium, an energy that speaks of what we did not dare to say, and now it is too late.
Composer Dominykas Digimas
The set design for this work is an intermediate space for possible encounters. Here a dialogue is established with what is nearby and what remains unknown beyond. The action takes place in a transitional space that highlights states of being, in an airport waiting room, which, although monumental, is constantly changing its shape – turning into spaces where we encounter ourselves and others. The visual atmosphere of the work is spacious and calm, creating an opportunity to take a step back and look from a distance – at others, at ourselves, and at how everything passes. This space is dedicated to life, the unknown, and yearning.
Set designer and author of the video projection concept Barbora Šulniūtė
From the very first moment, I understood that the opera Things I Didn’t Dare to Say, and It’s Too Late Now will speak the language of truth, sensitivity, and the heart, that it will be unconventional, innovative, and powerful – and I want to be a part of.
It is a privilege to touch upon people’s secrets – texts that are not acted out and that are spoken to those who will never hear them. At the same time, the telephone booth opera always affects me deeply as a person, as a witness. And I find myself in a state where I remember someone close to me, my feelings for them, my gratitude and endless love, which I did not express.
In the opera, the music, the texts of the audio recordings, the images, the movements, and the relationships felt create a kind of ritual, a therapeutic atmosphere, a prayer that transfers to another world, where we all meet without secrets or omissions, and ultimately comes the realisation that we will all meet again in this world as well.
Then hope, joy, and love shine through.
Music director and conductor Ričardas Šumila
Thank you, Mom.
The telephone booth opera was nominated at the Lithuanian professional performing arts awards (Golden Cross of the Stage) for best direction, set design, and costume design, and also received an award from the foreign jury at the Vilnius International Theatre Festival Sirenos. The music for the piece won a prize at the 2024 Lithuanian Composers’ Union Awards. A vinyl record of this opera was released in 2025.