Mario Banushi’s “MAMI” at the 79th Avignon Festival

From the moment he first stepped onto the Greek theater scene, Mario Banushi made a striking impression on the international artistic landscape. Now, at just 26, he reaches another milestone as his performance "MAMI", an Onassis Stegi production, travels this July to the renowned Avignon Festival. This marks a historic moment: Banushi is the first director of Albanian descent to present his work at this iconic French and European festival. It is also the fourth time an Onassis Stegi production participates in this prestigious event, following Dimitris Dimitriadis’ "The Circle of the Square", directed by Dimitris Karantzas (2014), "6 a.m. How to Disappear Completely" by Blitz theatre group (2016), and "The Great Tamer" by Dimitris Papaioannou (2017).

After Avignon—where the festival itself is a co-producer—"MAMI" will embark on a major international tour, making stops at leading theaters and institutions across Europe and beyond.

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.

Mario Banushi comments: “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.”

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.

“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