Juan Pablo Troncoso: Desires

Translated from Spanish by Agnė PULOKAITĖ. Chilean director, actor, acting teacher and founder of “La Re-sentida” Marco Layera will create his first production in Lithuania. His work has been presented at the most renowned 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 University of Chile’s Eugenio Guzmán Award and was nominated for the Chilean Premio Altazor a los Artes Nacionales.

Based on a play by fellow Chilean Juan Pablo Troncoso and drawing on Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire,” the production follows Blanche (actress Vitalija Mockevičiūtė), who returns to unbearably stifling Lithuania after a failed life in one of Europe’s great capitals. She comes back reluctantly from Berlin, concealing her artistic failure. Her progressive ideas hit a wall in her hometown’s stagnant conservative landscape, embodied by her beloved sister (actress Dalia Michelevičiūtė), who has recently married a man who lives with her in a care home (actor Algirdas Gradauskas).

The protagonist’s ambitious dreams of becoming a famous artist have not come true. She is once again in Eastern, not Western, Europe; time weighs on her, she is irritated by her ageing body and sense of being unwanted. Her daughter (actress Augustė Ona Šimulynaitė), meanwhile, is only beginning to shape her dreams: she wants to become a famous stand-up comedian. The young woman jokes about her family and her mother, and pokes 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 delirium; talk of a healthcare worker who recently died speaks to the harsh, difficult reality 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, secrets begin to evaporate. The fans barely turn, and sweat quietly runs down faces.

The production is at times a painful, at times comic meditation on promises that were never fulfilled, and a reflection on family ties, today’s obsession with youth and novelty, the difficulties of caring, 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.