performing juliet
The story of a woman in a Romanian prison that changed one actor forever is mined and memorialized in this international collaboration.
Widely considered one of the most innovative voices in Hungarian theater, András Visky has enjoyed growing audiences and increased critical acclaim over the last fifteen years...
A deep resonance with the play Juliet led actor Melissa Lorraine across Europe to meet playwright András Visky. Visky proposed the English premiere of this one-woman show for Lorraine, who has since toured Juliet in hundreds of cities around the world.
The film is an experiment in exploring the layers of the play in a new and permanent form. Theater is, by definition, ephemeral; the Juliet film will be a lasting testament to the power of a play and how it shaped the actor living inside the telling of the story.
Performing Juliet
András Visky’s 2002 theater piece JULIET concerns a woman sent to a gulag along with her seven children after her husband, a political dissident, is sentenced to 22 years in prison by Romania’s Communist regime. Though her ordeal is rendered dreamily as a stream-of-consciousness monologue, the story is hard fact: The woman was Visky’s mother, the dissident his father, and Visky himself was the youngest of the children, who together rescued her from the morgue after she was mistaken for dead. The real Juliet could have avoided this suffering if she’d agreed to divorce and renounce her husband. But she refused and so remained in the gulag for seven years.
American actor Melissa Lorraine discovered Juliet while working at Studio K Theatre in Budapest. Back home in Chicago, she produced and starred in the play’s first English-language staging, and went on to perform it over 300 times at Theatre Y (where she is Artistic Director) and all over the world.
Yet for much of the time she was embodying Juliet’s unconditional love, she faced a captivity of her own in the form of a failing, violent marriage.
In order to tell their two intertwined stories, director Visky and actor Lorraine, found the use of documentary form along with an experimental dramatic structure, to craft a riveting short film. Performing Juliet, explores the possibilities of theatre and cinema to explore such severe themes and circumstances, and brings the theater (as a character) to the screen to investigate its capacity to heal, to restore, or to liberate us.
The Juliet Film is truly an international collaboration:
Romanian/Hungarian playwright and director András Visky (Hungarian Theatre of Cluj)
Hungarian designer Jackie Triste (Ovekk_Finn)
American actor Melissa Lorraine (Theatre Y)
Egyptian cinematographer Mohamed Mahmud (The Square, 2013)
Laszlo Dunai and a Hungarian editing team - Focus Fox Studios Budapest (Son of Saul 2015)
Musicians Peter Szabo, Tamas Szabo and Peter Visky
