Juan Pablo Troncoso: Desires

Translated from Spanish by Agnė PULOKAITĖ

Director, actor, acting teacher and founder of “La Re-sentida,” Chilean Marco Layera will create his first production in Lithuania. His work has been presented at the world’s best-known international theatre festivals, including Avignon. At the Teatro Municipal de Las Condes Young Theatre Festival, Marco Layera received an award for best play. He has also received the Eugenio Guzmán Award from the University of Chile and was nominated for Chile’s Premio Altazor a los Artes Nacionales.

The production is based on a play by fellow Chilean Juan Pablo Troncoso and takes Tennessee Williams’s *A Streetcar Named Desire* as its point of departure. Its central character, Blanche (actress Vitalija Mockevičiūtė), returns to unbearably stifling Lithuania after a failed life in one of Europe’s major capitals. Reluctantly returning from Berlin, she conceals her artistic failure. Her progressive ideas meet a wall in the frozen conservative landscape of her hometown, embodied by her beloved sister (actress Dalia Michelevičiūtė), who has recently married a man living in a care home (actor Algirdas Gradauskas).

The protagonist’s ambitious desire to become a famous artist has gone unfulfilled. She is once again in Eastern, not Western, Europe; time weighs on her, her ageing body irritates her, and she feels unwanted. Her daughter (actress Augustė Ona Šimulynaitė), meanwhile, is still shaping her dreams and wants to become a famous stand-up comedian. The young woman jokes about her family and her mother, poking fun at countries even farther east than Lithuania.

The action of this irony-filled production unfolds in a care home suffocating in the heat. Here, the characters confront not only physical decline and loneliness, but also desire, fantasy and delusion; talk of a healthcare worker who recently died speaks to the harsh realities of care work. The heatwave is more than a meteorological phenomenon: it is an emotional state, a social symptom, an unbearable tension. Bodies grow hot, memories flare up, secrets begin to evaporate. The fans barely turn, and sweat silently runs down faces.

At times painful and at times comic, the production is a meditation on promises that were never fulfilled, and a reflection on family ties, today’s youth and its obsession with novelty, the difficulties of caregiving and abandonment. It speaks of bodies that the modern world has learned to use up and forget. Western and Eastern Europe are portrayed here as two remnants of an exhausted world—ruins from which nothing new will grow.