Falcon Theater in Newport will present Juliet: A Dialogue About Love starting Friday with six performances through December 20.
Romanian, ethnic-Hungarian playwright Andras Visky is one of the premiere theatrical voices in Eastern Europe. His play Juliet is a powerful and important 90-minute, one-woman story based on the author’s family under the brutal Communist regime in Romania during the early 1960s.
The play is told by Visky’s mother, the title character, as a dialog between her and God and sometimes Death as she struggles to survive with her seven young children in a communist gulag.
Visky’s father, a pastor in the Hungarian Reformed Church, was sentenced to 22 years in prison for the crime of “organization against socialist public order.” Soon after, his wife and their children were themselves deported to a Romanian gulag a thousand kilometers to the east. Visky was only two years old at the time.
In 1964, the family was reunited when his father and other political prisoners were released during a short-lived period of relaxation of repression.
Visky’s theatrical style was being formed from that moment forward and remains an essential voice for freedom, justice and survival against repression.
The play is directed by Zoe Peterson and features Samantha Joy Weil as Juliet.
Performances are at 7:30 p.m. on December 5, 6, 12, 13, 19 and 20 at Falcon Theater, 636 Monmouth Street, Newport.
Tickets may be purchased here.