We Are Not Home

A father is dying, a son is growing up. And the Raven hasn't been walked again. Time flows past the windows of an apartment on Fedákova Street in Bratislava. A quiet household pulses with big beat, conflicts and questions that are hard to speak about and perhaps a little easier to... write. How far can it be from one room to another? From a man to a boy and from a boy to a man? And how to bridge this distance when time is running out and the water is rising?

Letters exchanged by forty-eight-year-old Slovak musician and documentarian Dežo Ursiny (1947–1995) and his seventeen-year-old son Jakub (1977) through the hallway of their apartment after Jakub moved in with his father represent an attempt to adjust to each other and find harmony in their shared life—to leave nothing unsaid in the face of Dežo's terminal illness. With courage, both writers open up about personal and painful subjects, confessing their fears, dependencies and hopes, revealing their vulnerability and capacity to hurt, and experiencing in each other their own finitude and infinity.

The correspondence, published as Hello Dad – Dear Kubo, is woven by this theatre production with Dežo's diary entries and live-performed songs without choruses, in which the "Bratislava John Lennon" recited texts in his unmistakable way—texts full of everyday life, sadness and longing for freedom.