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?
 

Having no children can be a rational choice, yet the pressure to become parents is so strong that some couples never even consider the possibility of remaining child-free. In Lithuania today, around 15 per cent of couples face infertility; 4 out of 5 couples divorce after the loss of a child; one in five women experiences miscarriage; and roughly 19 per cent of women develop postnatal depression. The statistics speak volumes – but the feelings surrounding reproduction, too often, remain behind closed doors.

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