Juliet is a work of both real life and poetry: a story of a woman arrested and deported with her seven children to the Romanian wilderness under the communist regime of the 1950s.
Juliet, Hungary. Playwright: Andras Visky. Director: Michael Sexton. Cast: Kate Forbes. Translated by: David Robert Evans. With revisions by Ailisha O’Sullivan and Jozefina Komporaly.
Juliet was written in tribute to the author’s mother. Visky, a Hungarian-Romanian playwright, poet, and essayist, was born in 1957, the youngest of seven children. One year later, his father was sentenced to 22 years in prison and forced labor by the Romanian communist authorities. Andras Visky, his mother, and his siblings were then deported to a remote encampment, where they subsisted on the sheer determination of a despairing mother and enterprising eldest brother who somehow kept the family alive.
The play tells the story from the perspective of the children who rescued their mother from death. The poetic language offers the chance to convey a specific historical incident through a recognizable and universal dramatic situation, transposing into our times a recurrent theme from Ancient Greek theater: the struggles of a woman for her freedom.
Andras Visky will introduce the work from Romania via livestreaming.
“After the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, my father was sentenced for 22 years, and he disappeared in a prison. The place of his detention was not known to us. One year after my father’s incarceration, the communist authorities decided to deport us to a gulag prison camp, located in the southeast part of the country. For my Austrian-born mother, who at that time didn’t speak Romanian, it was extremely hard, practically unachievable to keep her seven kids alive, while performing the daily amount of work as a forced laborer. After several months she collapsed because of a heart attack, and she ended up in a morgue.” ”
Free and open to the public. Online registration through Eventbrite is required.
The 2022 Spring Stage Readings: Bridging the Worlds is dedicated to the people of Ukraine fighting for their independence. 🇺🇦 Suggested donation ($10) will be used to support Ukrainian refugees. All collected funds will be donated to People in Need, a Czech non-governmental, non-profit organization with over 20 years of experience in helping people in emergencies all over the world.
Proof of vaccination and wearing of a face mask during the event is required.
ABOUT
ANDRAS VISKY is a poet, playwright and essayist and the resident dramaturg at Hungarian Theatre of Cluj, Romania, where he also holds the position of artistic director. His plays have been staged in several countries including Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, France, Great Britain, Italy, Poland, Serbia, Slovakia and the United States. He has a DLA (Doctor of Liberal Arts) from the University of Theatre and Film, Budapest, and since 2019 he has been a professor of performance studies and dramaturgy at the Babeş-Bolyai University and a guest professor at Károli Gáspár University in Budapest. He taught as a guest lecturer and visiting professor at many universities, such Yale School of Drama, UCSD, Moholy-Nagy Unviversity of Art and Design, Korea National University of Arts in Seoul etc. In 2016 he became a member of the Academy of Literature and Arts in Budapest. Over the course of his play writing, Visky has developed what he terms a “barrack dramaturgy.” Having grown up in an Eastern European gulag, he returns again and again in his plays to what it means to be a prisoner and the problem of being set free. Over the years he published more than twenty books (essays on theater and playwriting, plays, poetry). He received numerous awards, including the Salvatore Quasimodo Award (2001), ARTISJUS Award (2004), József Attila Award (2009), and Szép Ernő Award (2002, 2017).
MICHAEL SEXTON is a director, dramaturg, teacher, and Director of the Public Shakespeare Initiative at The Public Theater. Dramaturg: King Lear (Cort Theater), Hamlet (Public), Othello (NYTW). Director: Coriolanus (Red Bull), The Winter’s Tale (Pearl), As You Like It, Henry V (Two River), Titus Andronicus (Public), and new plays by Rinne Groff, Will Eno, Marsha Norman, Caryl Churchill, Ain Gordon, Rogelio Martinez, Kelly Masterson and Phil Porter. Teacher at NYU, Columbia, Princeton, Rutgers, UNC, Juilliard and Taconic Correctional. He directed readings of Havel play excerpts presented at the Vaclav Havel Library Foundation Gala in September 2021, and is dramaturg and text consultant for the current production of Macbeth on Broadway.
CAST
KATE FORBES Most recently played Nora Melody in the Irish Rep production of A Touch of the Poet. Other Eugene O’Neill productions: Josie in A Moon for the Misbegotten at the Theatre Royal, Waterford, Ireland, Lyric Theatre, Belfast. Broadway: The School for Scandal (Theater World Award), Inherit the Wind (w/ George C. Scott), Macbeth, and Sight Unseen. Off-Broadway: All’s Well That Ends Well, The Merchant of Venice (w/F.Murray Abraham, also at the RSC), The Jew of Malta, Othello (Calloway Award), Theater For A New Audience. Janis Joplin in Love, Janis at The Village Theater; Desdemona in Othello (with Liev Schreiber) for the Public Theater; The Entertainer, CSC. Recent regional: Steel Magnolias (Heritage Theater), Hamlet, Macbeth, Henry V, La Dispute, The Crucible (Hartford Stage). Two tours with The Acting Company. TV/film credits: Wanda/Vision, Mercy Street, Law and Order. The Sacrament, The Longest Ride, Term Life, Steel Country, Hot Summer Nights, All Saints.
DAVID ROBERT EVANS, a translator, editor and writer from Oxford, UK, has long had a close connection with Central-East Europe. Equally at ease in both languages, David has rendered all kinds of Hungarian works into English, including poems, prose fiction, stage plays and screenplays, as well as a wide variety of non-fiction books.
THE 2022 SPRING STAGE READINGS
The 2022 Spring Stage Readings: Bridging the Worlds is organized by the Vaclav Havel Library Foundation and the Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association in partnership with the Polish Cultural Institute New York, Untitled Theater Company #61, Consulate General of the Czech Republic in New York, GOH Productions, and Romanian Cultural Institute. The festival is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. Spring Stage Readings is part of the Rehearsal for Truth Theater Festival honoring the playwright and human rights activist Vaclav Havel.
The 2022 edition has been conceived in consultation with Attila Szabo, Deputy Director, Hungarian Theatre Museum and Institute; Martina Peckova-Cerna, Head, International Cooperation Department, Arts and Theatre Institute, Prague; Tomek Smolarski, Performing Arts Programming, Polish Cultural Institute New York; Raluca Cimpoiasu, Program Manager, Romanian Cultural Institute; Vladislava Fekete, Director, Theatre Institute in Bratislava; and Andrea Domeova, Head of the Centre for Editorial Activities, Theatre Institute in Bratislava.