Tinder Dates

A performance Tinder Dates based on a play by Gabrielė Labanauskaitė under the same title is a kind of social research that focusses on the issues and twists in the relationships of modern young people – the so-called millennium generation, specifically – on the extremely popular Tinder dating app as a phenomenon. The play features actors of the younger generation (ages between 24 and 30) who embody characters of their age. The central theme of the play is, of course, love: how to find it and what we generally call love these days; how and when to love when we are all so busy, in a hurry, on the run; when we devote a huge amount of time for self-realisation, careers, work, while leaving our feelings aside and postponing them. The play raises questions such as: why finding a loved one is the exception rather than the rule? Why young people who seek and want the same things don’t find common ground? Why meeting, being together is often prevented by fear? According to the director Gabrielė Tuminaitė, basically, the play reveals a collision between love and great fear. “There is a lot of pursuit of love here – after all, we all want a one-day flirtation, we want to be liked, to be a part of a group we like, – basically, we all want hedonistic things,” says the director.

“I had cherished the idea and desire to write a play about the Tinder dating app for quite a long time, but I realised that my experience alone was not enough. I needed to involve more people into this idea. Therefore, I was very happy when director Tuminaitė invited me to create a performance together. I’m very pleased that we managed to realise our idea and an interesting laboratory process took place,” says the playwright Gabrielė Labanauskaitė.

The play was written during rehearsals and afterwards, based on the personal experiences and impressions of the actors, the playwright herself, as well as people who use the Tinder app. “In trying to explore the theme, I read a lot of books and articles on this app; I also listened to and read many authentic testimonies, including those of members of the creation team. I asked my Facebook friends to share their insights, and they presented quite a few stories and examples of their correspondence. In fact, I see the Tinder app simply to make acquaintances. I think that at different times, the ways to make acquaintances were different too. And this is neither good nor bad, it just means natural change and that the means of establishing a relationship have been changing. Whereas people, as everywhere in the world, are highly diverse: happy and unhappy, single and no single. By using this app, everyone finds what they are looking for: someone wants to be a saver and finds the one who needs to be saved; someone may not be ready for a relationship yet, but is already looking for it...,” says the playwright.

According to Labanauskaitė, the performance does not have a coherent narrative, one storyline with a climax – the dramaturgy here is created from individual episodes, yet all of them refer to people’s search for each other. The director Tuminaitė says that these are short stories that are not necessarily interrelated, but each sketch, no matter its type – comic, absurd or phantasmagorical, is about meetings, about how that other person changes us. “K. G. Jung’s thought that people are like chemical elements is very relevant at this point: if you connect two of them, at least for a short while, for a moment, they already change each other,” the director says.

The performance features eight characters and the hosts of a podcast. Thus, the play consists of eight dating stories of young people. It tells not only about the moment of acquaintance, but also about how dating starts, how mutual expectations are elucidated; the fears and dangers faced by users of the Tinder app are revealed. “It was important for me that people would get to know not only this app’s principles of operation but also learn certain rules for using it. With this end in view, I invoked hosts of a podcast who teach how to make acquaintances, what should be watched out for, when to answer the first messages, when to decide to meet, what steps should be taken before meeting live so that one would not be disappointed later, etc.,” Labanauskaitė reveals.

The playwright believes in the healing power of communication, and that it is not so much the form of communication (live or virtual) that is important, but the connection between people. Being alone and lonely for some time is not so bad, it’s just hard to endure that for a long time. However, loneliness can also be rewarding. But if one finds it depressing, then maybe flashing on the screen without leaving one’s home is the solution?..

About the playwright

Gabrielė Labanauskaitė is a playwright, writer, academician. She writes for the Lithuanian and foreign theatre and opera stage, creates scripts for films; she has produced a total of nearly thirty creations for the theatre stage since 2005. Labanauskaitė teaches the disciplines of playwriting and creative writing at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre; as an Associate Professor, she is interested in the principles of constructing narratives and has disclosed the research of those principles in her scientific monograph “Dramatika” (2017). A collection of her plays “Dramos” (“Dramas”) came out in 2002 in Lithuanian and English.

Labanauskaitė, together with the creation team, was awarded with more than one Golden Stage Cross. The sketch of the Vilnius State Small Theatre performance TinderDates based on Gabrielė Labanauskaitė’s play (directed by G. Tuminaitė and Stas Zhyrkov, Ukraine) in 2022 won the Dalia Tamulevičiūtė stage art competition of Lithuanian authors.

Additional information:

(Ages 16+): explicit content, electronic cigarettes.