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 world’s most renowned international theatre festivals, including Avignon. At the Young Theatre Festival at Teatro Municipal de Las Condes, 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.

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

The protagonist’s ambitious dreams of becoming a famous artist have not come true. She is back in Eastern, not Western, Europe; time weighs on her, her ageing body irritates her, and she feels unwanted. Her daughter (Augustė Ona Šimulynaitė), meanwhile, is still shaping her own dreams: she wants to become a famous stand-up comedian. The young woman jokes about her family and mother, and pokes fun at countries even farther east than Lithuania.

The action of this irony-laden production unfolds in a care home stifled by the heat. Here, the characters confront not only physical decline and loneliness, but also desires, fantasies and delusions. Talk of a recently deceased healthcare worker 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 up, secrets begin to evaporate. Fans barely turn, while sweat silently runs down faces.

The production is at times a painful, at times a comic meditation on promises that were never fulfilled. It reflects on family ties, the present-day obsession with youth and novelty, the difficulties of caregiving, and neglect. 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 a depleted world—ruins from which nothing new will grow.