MAMI | Mario Banushi

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.

“When I was about a year old, my mother had to leave me with my grandmother in Albania and go away. Until I was thirteen, I called my grandmother ‘mami.’ When my mother took me with her to Athens, I grew up in the apartment above the bakery where she worked, with the smell of freshly baked bread. I grew up around many women. I grew up around young women and old women. I grew up with more than one mother. This show is for them: a wish, a prayer to the weight the word ‘mom’ carries for both the one who hears it and the one who says it. Who takes care of whom—I never understood this complicated relationship. And I never will. But I’m trying to unravel it like an umbilical cord, like the viscera that connects life to its roots.”

-Mario Banushi

–Mario Banushi has made an impressive entrance into the theater world over the previous two years of being active in the field. Following his first play, “Ragada” (2022), he collaborated with notable organizations in Greece and composed two works that helped him gain international recognition: “Goodbye, Lindita” (National Theatre of Greece, 2023) και “Taverna Miresia―Mario, Bella, Anastasia” (Athens and Epidaurus Festival, 2023). From 2023 to date, his works have been presented in over ten countries, from Germany to Australia and from Italy to Sweden, at major festivals such as Festival de Otoño (Madrid, Spain), Teszt Festival (Timisoara, Romania), Adelaide Festival (Australia), Brandhaarden Festival at the International Theatre Amsterdam (The Netherlands), Fast Forward Festival (Dresden, Germany), and BITEF (Belgrade, Serbia).

–As an Onassis AiR Fellow through the Dramaturgy Fellowships in the 2023–24 season, Mario Banushi, after an existential trilogy about life and death, began an investigation into folk traditions about motherhood that would inspire his work, “MAMI,” and presented the performance “Mam, I Remember Everything” during the 12th Onassis AiR Open Day. There, the images of mother, food, ritual, care, and love found a way to powerfully portray a dream while preserving its raw material.

–A recurring theme in Mario Banushi’s performances is the home, the roof, the mother’s nest. His works, “Ragada,” “Goodbye, Lindita,” and “Taverna Miresia―Mario, Bella, Anastasia,” make spectators feel at home. Objects that we are all familiar with are transformed and reused. No matter how much the characters try to escape reality, they remain within the four walls. The interior of the house alters and takes the form of a tomb or shrine. In “MAMI,” Mario Banushi turns outside the house for the first time. However, the setting remains familiar. We are in the countryside, outside the house and by the road, lit only by an electric light bulb. In that familiar landscape, we transition from the confined system of the home and family to the outer world, the surroundings.

–Reviews about Mario Banushi:

“Banushi makes great play of the way that families use telly-watching to nullify their emotions.”
– Michael Billington, The Guardian, April 6, 2023

“Mario Banushi, a Greek playwright of Albanian heritage, is a rising star who represents the new face of Greek theatre.”
– Arifa Akbar, The Guardian, July 28, 2023

“Mario Banushi is one of the most important new voices in European theatre.”
– Lea Loeb, TheaterSpektakel, August 2024

“And, from Greece, comes director Mario Banushi with his play-without-words ‘Goodbye, Lindita,’ which has been hailed as the work of the next Romeo Castellucci.”
– Murray Bramwell, InReview, October 25, 2023

“[Mario Banushi’s directorial manuscript] brings emotional, dreamlike and poetically expressive glimpses of death and of facing it."
–Politika award jury, October 2023