Our 2007 offering will be the English-language professional production of Andras Visky’s Disciples. Disciples comes to us from Transylvania and one of the leading theatres in East Europe. Mr. Visky is dramaturg at the Hungarian State Theatre in Cluj-Napoca where the play had its premiere and where it continues in the repertory. Cluj-Napoca is the cultural capital of Transylvania,: a vibrant multi-ethnic city whose culture is extraordinarily rich, fueled by dynamic Romanian, Hungarian, and German-speaking communities.

Visky’s play asks us to consider what happens to faith under incredible duress. Like all his work the play takes place across time, referencing Christ’s disciples who have run away from Gologatha to take shelter in the “upper room,” as well as the prisons of the Romanian gulag - the harshest in communist East Europe.

Ten men are alone, in hiding and afraid. They must reconstruct what happened, what they were told, and what they are to do next given the sudden and violent departure of their master. Visky confronts us with the complexity of such a situation. The play focuses on the dangerous moments which follow the loss of a leader: what legacy remains and how do we honor it? How do we survive? How do we go forward in our lives? Visky takes us inside one of the most well-known stories in Western culture - the story of Christ’s disciples - but Visky asks us to see anew the extremely complex and contradictory situation which follows Christ’s death and precedes his Resurrection. For Visky this is a secular as well as a religious story and Disciples features his trademark mix of the poetic, the existential, and the absurd. The story is an universal one

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