|The Old-world Landowners|

Mindaugas Karbauskis, 30, a pupil of Pyotr Fomenko and a countryman of the Lithuanian Eimuntas Nekrosius, debuted last season with three remarkable productions. Of them, Old World Landowners is the most visual and the one least requiring translation. In it, Karbauskis avoids the use of words almost entirely, relying instead on a rich palette of visual images and sounds as the ideal international language — glances, gestures, the monotonous hoot of a horn, the footsteps of servants or the honking of geese as played by young actors. Gogol went back to the ancient myth of Philemon and Baucis for his tale about an old married couple who so love each other that even death cannot part them. Karbauskis's work, on the other hand, has echoes of Fomenko's fine-tuned details and Nekrosius's theatrical metaphors.