Talking about his play, which
performed from September 10 until October 3 at the ‘Royal George Theatre Center’
in Chicago, the Romanian playwright Andras Visky says “Juliet gives life to my soul.”
‘Theatre Y’ presented “Juliet: A
dialog about love” the true story of Visky’s mother, who is trapped in a world
of desperation between her husband and her God.
She challenges the divine power
to answer her cries of agony and prays for survival in a country that is not
hers, and a language she does not understand.
Visky’s father was a minister in
a Hungarian Reformed Church and because he didn’t want to renounce God the
Romanian communist authorities sentenced him to 22 years in prison, while his
family was deported to a Romanian gulag.
The play, one of few from the
East European contemporary drama that deals with the concentration camps of the
Gulag, is a one woman performance show which encloses a ninety minutes
monologue delivered with precision by the actress Melissa Hawkins.
The actress admits that
memorizing the entire play “is not my favored part of the job.” But now, after
touring the play for four years in US, Eastern Europe and Middle East, the
monologue comes easy to her, even though it used to be “incredibly tedious.”
On her senior year at Northern
Illinois University, Hawkins received an invitation to join Studio K, a
Hungarian theatre company in Budapest. “I accepted on the spot,” she confesses.
While she was performing in Hungary she received the English version of Juliet
and “fell madly in love with it.” Wanting to “shake the hand of the man who
wrote this masterpiece” she crossed the border to Transylvania (her visa had
already expired) and met with Visky who proposed her to perform the English
premier of the play, “a task I have never hoped for,” the actress says. After
her contract with Studio K expired, Hawkins began the endeavor of seeing Juliet
played in the United States.
At the premier, pleased with her
performance as Juliet, Visky encourage her to start a theatre company, “I can
write six more plays for you, you should start a company,” she remembers him
saying. And that’s how Theatre Y was born.
The theatre’s mission is to
create spaces for international dialogue through theatre. “Our company has
traveled the world, testing our productions on every kind of audience to insure
that we are in fact creating universal plays,” says Hawkins. Among the Theatre
Y productions there is another Visky play entitled “How I killed my mother”
which is also based on the true story of a Romanian girl abandoned by her
mother at birth. This play was also performed at the Chicago theatre.
While performing in Budapest,
Hawkins didn’t speak or understand the Hungarian language. She would have a
translator next to her for most of the times, except while on stage. Even
though all the plays were in Hungarian, she used to speak the words without
having any meaning to her. Her acting was solely based on her skills and on her
feelings.
Sometimes, at the end of the
show, people from the audience would go to talk to her to congratulate her. Big
was their surprise when they found out that she couldn’t understand or speak a
word of Hungarian. This fact prepared her, without her acknowledge at the time,
for the character she had to interpret in Juliet, who was also language
incapacitated for the entire period she was in detention in Romania.
Visky grew up in a Romanian
communist detention camp along with his mother and six siblings without
knowing, for five years, if his father was still alive or not.
Even under these unfortunate
circumstances, Juliet’s love for her husband was greater than herself: “Are you
coming with me?” he asked. I won’t go with you. I am you!” she answered. Even
when a Romanian lawyer came to offer her a way out from detention by just signing
the divorce paper, she refused it because she could not betray her husband in
any way, not even for her own salvation.
Visky’s play has an Eastern
European wit about it and in the mist of Juliet’s sorrow the people from the
audience found themselves laughing “I am the lawyer, the lawyer said.” The
writing is sprinkled with Romanian words which are well managed by the actress:
“Deschideti, militia!” (Open up. This is the police.)
Dressed in a red, dirty, ripped,
country-side woman dress, with muddied boots and both wedding bands on her
finger (her husband’s and hers), Hawkins as Juliet screams in agony, cries for
help, rolls-over, crawls, hides, jumps sings songs of desperation transforming
the Royal George Theatre little stage into a battle field. The sudden loud
music alternated with the flash of lights on certain emotions brings a high
level of energy to the tight space, and the audience is forced to bare witness.
Visky is “very grateful” for
Hawkins performance as Juliet saying that it “manages to reveal amazing depths
of human existence,” asking her “not to play my mother, but herself.”
The actress is sincere and she
confesses, “We cannot pretend to tell her story. Her son has written a play,
using true events from her life and purging his own demons through his
writing. Now I take his writing and purge mine.”
Hawkins says, “This role has
become the most pivotal part of who I am – body, mind and soul. It taught me
the meaning of marriage and faith – by taking me to the end of myself and allowing
me to discover more.”
She says the hardest part to
interpret is the “years of silence,” when Juliet doesn’t know if her husband is
still alive or not and she has “to struggle to keep the children alive on songs
and stories,” hoping that the real Juliet Visky “would be honored by my
interpretation.”
Seeing the show, Visky’s mother
has exclaimed that “It’s all true, and none of it’s true,” because when she
understood that the play is “the public confession” of her son, she accepted the
fact that she has being transformed in a “twentieth century saint,” as Visky
saw her.
The story of Julie is not to be
isolated only in the time frame that it took place, but has significance also
in the world we live today. “What is means to be free” the playwright believes
“is not a question specific only to the periods of dictatorship, but is one
that accompanies us every day.”
Visky says that he expects from
the audience to “understand that the suffering of little people is as profound
and important in history as the story of big people is.” For the future the
Romanian playwright plans to write a similar story about his father and his
sufferings.