The LNDT Will Close Its Season with a Play About the Frenzy of Youth, “Desire”

Rehearsal for the play “Desire.” Photo by Jurgija Strakšytė.

At the end of May, the Lithuanian National Drama Theater (LNDT) will present the play “Desire” in its New Stage, a work that reflects on the currently widespread obsession with youth and novelty. This will be the fifth premiere of the LNDT’s 86th season and the first work in Lithuania by an artist from South America, specifically Chile, who is already widely recognized in Europe.

In the play, based on a play by Chilean playwright Juan Pablo Troncoso, the main character, Blanša (played by Vitalija Mockevičiūtė), returns to the unbearably stifling heat of Lithuania after a failed life in one of Europe’s major capitals. She returns from Berlin reluctantly, hiding her artistic failure. Her progressive ideas clash with the stagnant, conservative landscape of her hometown like a wall, embodied by her beloved sister Stela (actress Dalia Michelevičiūtė), who recently married Stenlis, who works at a nursing home (actor Algirdas Gradauskas).

The protagonist’s dreams of becoming a famous artist have not come true and she finds herself once again in Eastern Europe, not Western Europe, weighed down by the passage of time, annoyed by her aging body and a sense of being unwanted, while her daughter (actress Augustė Ona Šimulynaitė) is still in the process of shaping her own dreams – she wants to be a famous stand-up comedian. The young woman cracks jokes about her family and her mother, poking fun at regions even further east than Lithuania.

The play “Desire”, inspired by Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire”, is directed by Marco Layera – a director, actor, acting teacher, and founder of “La Re-sentida” from Chile. While working in Germany, Kamilė Gudmonaitė, one of the former Artistic Directors of the LNDT, took notice of his work and invited him to come and create at the Lithuanian National Drama Theater.

“My acquaintance with Marco Layera began while I was staging a production at the Münchner Kammerspiele. In his work, I see a quality that is rare in today’s theater – the ability to be both politically incisive and humanly vulnerable at the same time. Layera’s theater is physical, grotesque, oscillating between trauma and humor; he creates not by illustrating, but by physically affecting the audience: through the body, emotional risk, collective energy, and a very real presence on stage.

This is a director who views theater as a live encounter in which the audience cannot remain neutral. For Lithuania, this may represent a new theatrical language; for the actors, it involves working methods that are not entirely familiar; and from a cultural and political perspective, it offers an exceptionally fascinating dialogue between Lithuania and Chile. The art of the latter country vividly reflects themes of authoritarianism, collective trauma, and social division; thus, although the two countries are very far apart, they share interesting connections and points of intersection,” says director Kamilė Gudmonaitė.

Marco Layera’s work has been presented at the most renowned international theater festivals, including the Avignon Festival. At the Young Theaters Festival at the Teatro Municipal de Las Condes in Chile, Marco Layera was awarded the prize for best play; he has also received the Eugenio Guzmán Award from the University of Chile and was nominated for the Chilean arts prize, the Premio Altazor a los Artes Nacionales.

“By choosing to address the topic of old age and setting the play in a nursing home, I am making a political statement. Social structures, including cultural ones, typically categorize and evaluate people based on criteria of productivity and youth, while rejecting and rendering invisible those who do not meet these standards. Giving these people a stage seems to me to be both important and urgent, on both a political and artistic level, and this needs to be done all over the world. We must ask ourselves: when does an individual cease to have value in the theater? Who decides which bodies (do not) deserve to be seen? Who in our culture has the right to visibility, to be heard, and to meaning?” reflects director Marco Layera.

The Set Designer for “Desire” is Barbora Šulniūtė; the Costume Designer is Marija Petraitytė; the Creative Assistants and Choreographers are Carolina de la Maza and Humberto Espinoza; the Light Designer is Dainius Urbonis; and the Composer is Gailė Griciūtė.

The action of this play, which is not lacking in irony, unfolds in a nursing home suffocated by the heat – here, the characters are confronted not only with physical decline and loneliness, but also with desires, fantasies, and delusions, while discussions about a recently deceased healthcare worker reveal the harsh and difficult reality of nursing work.

The play, which will premiere at the LNDT on 28 and 29 May, features Vitalija Mockevičiūtė, Augustė Ona Šimulynaitė, Jolanta Dapkūnaitė, Algirdas Gradauskas, Dalia Michelevičiūtė, Vainius Sodeika, Laurynas Jurgelis, and Diana Anevičiūtė.

The artists say that this production is a meditation – at times painful, at times comical – on promises that were never fulfilled; it is a reflection on family ties, the current obsession with youth and novelty, the difficulties of caring, and abandonment. The work speaks of bodies that the modern world has learned to consume and forget. Western and Eastern Europe are depicted here as two remnants of a ravaged world, as ruins from which nothing new will ever emerge.

The premiere of “Desire” will take place on 28 and 29 May in the New Stage of the LNDT; the play will then be performed on June 19 and 20.