"That's why in this play you'll hear the line ‘I was born in a prison,'" says the Hungarian National playwright, who at the age of one-and-a-half was deported to a Communist prison camp in Romania along with his mother and six siblings.
Visky's play, Backborn, an exploration of the consequences of such imprisonment, will take stage in its North American debut at the Lab Theatre as Calvin Theater Company performs, Stephanie Sandberg directs, and Visky oversees its production.
Backborn
Lab Theatre, Calvin College |
Not only a playwright, Visky is also a poet, an essayist, the resident dramaturg at the Hungarian State Theatre in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, a professor of theatre and television at Babeş-Bolyai University in the same city, and, for a few more weeks, a visiting professor at Calvin College.
Backborn, András Visky's latest play, is based on a number of true stories - including Visky's. His father, Ferenc Visky, a reformed pastor, was whisked away to a labor camp in 1958, accused of "crime of organization against the social order" by the Romanian Communist authorities. Soon after, the same authorities deported András, his mother, and his six siblings to a prison camp located on the Bărăgan Plain, a harsh region of blistering summers and brutal winters. He and his family spent the next six years in the prison camp.The play is an existential comedy set in the wake of World War II. An everyman figure returns home after years spent in a prison camp, only to find his psychology and sense of freedom radically altered by his prison experience. Though, in dismay, the protagonist finds he still behaves as a prisoner in the free world, his relationships counteract his disfigured mindset, offering instead hope, grace, and a means of surviving bleakness and transcending the destruction of humanity.
