Set in Romania, I Killed My Mother tells the story of Bernadette, a teenage girl who was abandoned after birth by her mother, a Roma (Gypsy) woman. She grows up in a series of Romanian orphanages, and forges a  relationship with Clip, her soul-mate, the Beatrice to her Dante, who dies trying to save her. She struggles to transcend the incessant brutality of her surroundings with her boy muse. Guided by Clip, she learns to excise parasitic relationships, to “kill”, to turn her back forever, even on the maternal bond, in order to realize her own extraordinary identity. I Killed My Mother is a fiction based on the true story of a Romanian orphan, just one of thousands who resulted from the neo-Stalinist economic and social control policies of dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu. To increase the low birth rate, contraception and abortion were outlawed. At the same time, the Communist regime introduced a harsh austerity program to pay off accumulated foreign debt. Most of the country's produce is exported, causing further shortages of food, fuel and other essentials. Families were starving and freezing. Desperate mothers abandoned their children at the hospitals where they were born. Orphanages and juvenile homes were created to deal with this multitude of orphans, but the conditions at most of these institutions were appalling and the staff often abusive. The issue continues to have ramifications for Romania even 20 years after Ceauşescu’s execution.

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Chicago Sun Times  |  Hedy Weiss   |    Recommended

Enter the world of “I Killed my Mother” – the poorly titled, but beautifully acted, drama by Romanian playwright Andras Visky < Translated by: Ailisha O’Sullivan> – and you find yourself enclosed by high, roughly whitewashed walls outlined by a perimeter of stones.

You are in the world of an institution that might as well be a prison.  You have entered the horrific landscape of a Romanian orphanage and juvenile “facility” during the reign of Nicolae Ceausescu, the brutal Communist-era dictator who fell, along with the Iron Curtain, in 1989.

Numerous photo essays and documentaries have been made about the appalling conditions that existed in such institutions – places where the bodies and souls of children were wantonly destroyed.  But, as often is the case, theater can communicated the emotion and specificity of such situations with particular eloquence.  And such is the case with Theatre Y’s production – now in its English language debut at the Greenhouse Theater.

Staged by Karin Coonrod ( a director  with an international resume that includes work at New York’s Public Theatre), it is being performed by two Northern Illinois University grads – Melissa Hawkins (who works extensively in Hungary and beyond), and Andrew Livingston.

The play, Dickensian in an Eastern European way (with a fierce, lean poetry that at moments sounds just a bit too sophisticated for its characters), is a vivid portrait of the early decades of Bernadette (Hawkins, a petite, dark-eyed, richly physical actress of immense intensity and clarity).   The child of a Gypsy mother and absent Hungarian father, her mother gave her up for adoption early on.  Subjected to all the brutal deprivations of two institutions (where she refers to the adults as “the liquidators, terminators, dog-catchers”), she is kept whole by her own invincibility and by her friendship with a devoted fellow “inmate,” Clip (the gentle and engaging Livingston), whose name refers to the sharp metal clips placed for punishment on the tongues of children who have “misbehaved.”

Bernadette describes the painful on again-off again adoption plans of a woman whose whims were determined by her romantic situation at any given moment (including with one utterly creepy Australian photographer only interested in gaining access to the orphanage).  She recounts her disastrous attempted escape into Yugoslavia.  And she conjures her brief burst of freedom at the Tiramisu Café, the bohemian hangout where she spends her days after her release at age 18.

Still starved for some sort of recognition from her birth mother, Bernadette seeks the woman out, only to realize she has been, and will always be, a motherless child.

written by:                       András Visky

translated by:                  Ailisha O’Sullivan

directed by:                     Karin Coonrod

featuring:                         Melissa Hawkins

                                          Andrew Livingston

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