„Geismas“ – the first play in Lithuania by Chilean director, actor, acting teacher, and founder of „La Re-sentida“ Marco Layera. His work is presented at the most famous international theater festivals, including Avignon. At the Young Theaters Festival „Teatro Municipal de Las Condes“, Marco Layera was awarded the prize for the best play, has also received the Eugenio Guzman award from the University of Chile, and was nominated for the Chilean art prize „Premio Altazor a los Artes Nacionales“.
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The play, based on another Chilean Juan Pablo Troncoso’s play and inspired by Tennessee Williams’ „A Streetcar Named Desire“, features the main character Blanša (actress Vitalija Mockevičiūtė) returning to unbearably stuffy Lithuania after a failed life in one of the major European capitals. She returns from Berlin reluctantly, hiding her artistic failure. Her progressive ideas clash with the stagnant conservative landscape of her hometown, embodied by her beloved sister (actress Dalia Michelevičiūtė), who recently married a man living in a nursing home (actor Algirdas Gradauskas).
The ambitious main character’s desires to become a famous artist remain unfulfilled; she is again in Eastern, not Western Europe, burdened by time, irritated by an aging body and a sense of uselessness, while her daughter (actress Augustė Ona Šimulynaitė) is still creating her dreams, wanting to be a famous stand-up comedian. The girl jokes about her family and mother, mocking regions even further east than Lithuania.
The action of the ironically rich play unfolds in a nursing home suffocated by heat – here the characters face not only physical decay and loneliness but also desires, fantasies, delusions, and conversations about a recently deceased healthcare worker reveal the harsh and difficult reality of nursing work.
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Heatwave – more than a meteorological phenomenon: it is an emotional state, a social symptom, unbearable tension. Bodies heat up, memories ignite, secrets start to evaporate. Fans barely spin, and sweat quietly runs down faces.
The play is a sometimes painful, sometimes comical meditation on promises that were never fulfilled; it is a reflection on family ties, current youth and novelty mania, the difficulties of caregiving, and neglect. The work speaks about bodies that the modern world has learned to use and forget. Western and Eastern Europe are depicted here as two remnants of a ravaged world – ruins from which nothing new will grow anymore.
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