You’re standing alone on stage. You face a packed theater, every seat is filled and all eyes are on you.

You are the only actor in this production — no co-stars to play off, no other actors to relieve the pressure. For the next hour and a half, you alone must hold the audience’s attention. Not an easy task, is it?

But for Melissa Hawkins, this is the role of a lifetime.

Hawkins, a 2002 graduate of the NIU School of Theatre and Dance, has now performed the one-woman play, “Juliet: A Dialogue About Love,” seven times. Presently, she is in Romania working on the play’s eighth production with director Christopher Markle, who is also the head of performance in the NIU School of Theatre and Dance.

The play tells the story of a woman, Juliet, who is held captive in a remote Romanian prison shortly after the Hungarian revolution of 1956. She alone must take care of her seven starving children because her husband has been imprisoned elsewhere. Juliet eventually gets sick and is placed in the prison camp’s morgue. It’s there that she meets God. Their introduction is anything but peaceful.

“[Juliet] grabs him by the shirt collar and confronts him about abandoning her and her family,” Hawkins said in an official NIU press release.

The play’s intense exploration and treatment of faith is what originally attracted Hawkins to the “beautiful and spiritual” story. She grew up in France until she was 10 when she moved to Wheaton, Ill. She was raised in a Christian home and Hawkins slowly learned the worlds of religion and theatre often conflicted.

After graduation, Hawkins was invited by Tomas Fodor to join his company in Hungary. Fodor is a prestigious Hungarian director who served a residency as a guest artist at NIU. While in Hungary, Hawkins met Andras Visky and was first introduced to his prize-winning play “Juliet: A Dialogue About Love.”

Visky wrote the play based off of his mother’s personal memoirs, which she had turned into a book titled “The Orphans and the Ravens.” It told the true story of her captivity as well as the stories of her son Andras and his six other siblings who lived in the prison with her.

Hawkins spent a week with Visky and his family in Transylvania, after which Visky gifted Hawkins with the rights to the English version of his play. The NIU School of Theatre and Dance agreed to produce it and Markle signed on to direct. The two set off to Cluj, Romania to work with Visky.

“Andras is a force of nature. He’s extraordinarily talented — extraordinarily warm — and his openness to this whole process has been key,” Markle said.

Ultimately, they say “Juliet” is a story about love. Life in a wartime prison camp removes “everything that makes you human.” Juliet learns that the love of God won’t erase the human emotions of loss and loneliness.

“When I first read the play, in one sitting, I was truly inspired by the nature of her relationship with God. Once Andras gave me the play to perform, my relationship with it changed a little,” Hawkins said.

It is the only role Hawkins has played in the last three years, and one that leaves her alone on the stage without fellow actors for support or interaction. But according to Hawkins, it has propelled her onto a “personal journey as an actress and a woman.”

Paul Giuntoli is a film critic for the Northern Star.