Director, Set Designer & Adaptation by – Artūras Areima

Costume Designer – Valdemara Jasulaitytė

Movement Consultant – Sigita Juraškaitė

Lighting Designer – Julius Kuršys

Composer – π (Monika Poderytė)

Stage Manager – Eglė Kuzienė

Lorca’s poems translated from Spanish by – Henrikas Bakanas

Yerma is a performance about relationships that grow cold; about a demanding body; about love that is no longer safe; about motherhood without glitter; and about the courage to accept what is so often left unsaid.

In director Artūras Areima’s stage rendition of Federico García Lorca’s play Yerma, the focus turns to reproduction. At its core lies the tension between social expectations, the pressure to have children, and an individual’s freedom to shape their own life. Different facets of motherhood come into view, along with contradictions: the helplessness of being unable to conceive, set against the exhaustion and danger of losing yourself when you do.

Written in 1934, Lorca’s Yerma is reimagined by Areima: its language, moral dilemmas, and themes are shifted into the present day.

The play tells the story of a young woman tormented by the social stigma of a childless marriage. Yerma becomes consumed by the idea of having a child in order to meet what she believes is the ‘proper’ standard. It is about a body that begins to overrule the mind; about love that cannot be contained within the boundaries of a couple; about motherhood as desire, as God, as illness, as protest. Yerma speaks to the longing for meaning when all the other ways of making life meaningful no longer work.

The creative team raises questions that are urgently relevant today. How is reproduction bound up with identity, social roles, and a sense of fulfilment? What do couples go through when they cannot have children, or after a miscarriage? Where does the social pressure to have a child come from?

This is a story about what happens when a woman no longer wants to be “strong,” “proper,” or “functional,” but instead longs to be alive. Yerma, at its core, is not about children, but about desire.

On stage, we see not only the destruction of a woman, but also her beauty: laughter, passion, anger, prayer. The performance offers no comfort and no solutions – quite the opposite, it leaves the viewer face to face with questions that are not easy to answer. It is a tragedy of the modern human being, searching for meaning when God is silent, love fades, and the body still longs for a miracle.

///

Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) was a Spanish poet, playwright and prose writer. Although he is often described as one of the great modernisers of 20th-century poetry and drama, he himself never consciously sought that role. He consistently strove to stand with the marginalised and the oppressed. Lorca was killed during the Spanish Civil War, in circumstances shrouded in mystery. Calling himself a supporter of social theatre, his dramas carry not only the sense of inescapable fate so characteristic of Greek tragedy – but also a deep unease about the promise of European ‘progress’. Lorca’s plays pulse with anxiety and spiritual tension: the anticipation of looming danger, fear of violent death, and the fatal certainty of its inevitability. Yerma is part of a trilogy (Blood Wedding, Yerma, The House of Bernarda Alba). In 1992, it was staged at Kaunas National Drama Theatre and Juozas Miltinis Drama Theatre.

Artūras Areima is one of the most distinctive Lithuanian theatre-makers of his generation. Since 2017, he has been a candidate for the Europe Prize Theatrical Realities. Areima has repeatedly received top professional recognition. In 2013, he was awarded the Borisas Dauguvietis Earring for exploring new forms of stage expression. He was also nominated more than once – in 2013, 2014, 2015 – for the Golden Stage Cross as a director. In 2014, Areima established his eponymous theatre, and works produced under its banner have toured some of the most prominent festivals across Europe and Asia.

///

YERMA

I’m afraid of becoming nothing but a body you remember now and then. I want a body that creates another body. I want something to grow inside me – not only thoughts and fear.

///

A co-production by Vilnius Old Theatre and Artūras Areima Theatre

Project funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture

Cast:

Yerma – Eglė Špokaitė

María – Eglė Grigaliūnaitė

Desmina – Juliana Volodko

Elena – Liuda Gnatenko

Roberto – Artur Svorobovič

Víctor – Aleksandr Kanajev / Viačeslav Lukjanov

Photos by Telman Ragimov