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 is presented at the world’s 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 Eugenio Guzman Award from the University of Chile and was nominated for Chile’s 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 centres on Blanche (actress Vitalija Mockevičiūtė), who returns to unbearably sweltering Lithuania after a failed life in one of Europe’s great capitals. She comes back from Berlin reluctantly, concealing her artistic failure. Her progressive ideas meet 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 heroine’s ambition to become a famous artist has come to nothing. 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 only beginning to shape her dreams: she wants to become a famous stand-up comedian. The young woman jokes about her family and mother, and pokes fun at lands even farther east than Lithuania.

The action of this irony-filled production unfolds in a care home stifled by the heat. Here, the characters face not only physical decline and loneliness, but also their desires, fantasies and delusions. Talk of a recently deceased healthcare worker speaks to the harsh and 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 up, 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. It reflects on family ties, today’s obsession with youth and novelty, the difficulties of caregiving and abandonment. The work speaks of bodies that the modern world has learned to use up and forget. Western and Eastern Europe are depicted here as two remnants of an exhausted world—ruins from which nothing new will grow.