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 leading 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.

The play is based on a work 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. She comes back reluctantly from Berlin, concealing her artistic failure. Her progressive ideas hit a wall in her hometown’s stagnant conservative landscape—a wall embodied by her beloved sister (actress Dalia Michelevičiūtė), who has recently married a man who lives with her in a nursing home (actor Algirdas Gradauskas).

The protagonist’s ambitious dream of becoming a famous artist has not come true. 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 countries even farther east than Lithuania.

The action of this ironic production unfolds in a nursing home stifled by heat. Here, the characters confront not only physical decline and loneliness, but also desires, fantasies and delusions. Talk of a recently deceased healthcare worker points to the harsh and difficult 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, while 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 caring for others, and abandonment. The work 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.