Juliet

Transylvanian playwright Visky’s solo play depicts his mother, who spent years in a Romanian gulag as an enemy of the state, separated from her husband while trying to keep her seven children alive. Visky, the youngest, was two years old when the family was imprisoned. He approaches his mother’s story with a gimlet eye; his portrait of Juliet is remarkably free of sentimentality. She is angry with God and sometimes with her children, her will to survive ebbs and flows, and she has her fair share of selfish thoughts.

Theatre Y artistic director Hawkins, who met Visky in 2001 while working with Budapest’s Studio K, has been performing Juliet for years on tour, and the material seems practically seared into her flesh. Not a word that comes out of her mouth is false or forced, and she brings a feral, untamed physicality to her arguments with God. But her physical choices can veer into the showy; Coonrod should rein in the instances in which Hawkins flings herself against walls or crawls underneath platforms and let us concentrate instead on Visky’s powerful words.

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