2022 Spring Stage Readings: Juliet

A work of both real life and poetry, Juliet tells a powerful story of a woman arrested and deported with her seven children to the Romanian wilderness under the communist regime of the 1950s.

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.