Juan Pablo Troncoso. A Streetcar Named Desire

The play was translated from Spanish by Agnė PULOKAITĖ. Director, actor, acting teacher and founder of “La Re-sentida” Marco Layera from Chile 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 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 taking Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” as its point of departure, the production follows its central character, Blanche (actress Vitalija Mockevičiūtė), as she returns to unbearably stuffy Lithuania after a failed life in one of Europe’s great capitals. She comes back from Berlin reluctantly, hiding her artistic failure. Her progressive ideas hit a wall in her hometown’s frozen 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 ambitious dreams of becoming a famous artist have not come true for the protagonist. She is back in Eastern, not Western, Europe, weighed down by time, irritated by her aging body and a sense of being unwanted. Her daughter (actress Augustė Ona Šimulynaitė), meanwhile, is still shaping 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 distinctly ironic production unfolds in a care home stifled by heat. Here, the characters confront not only physical decline and loneliness, but also desire, fantasy and delusion; talk of a recently deceased healthcare worker speaks to the harsh, 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, and sweat silently runs down faces.

The production is at times a painful, at times a comic meditation on promises that never came true. It reflects on family ties, today’s youth and obsession with the new, the difficulties of care 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.