"I Killed My Mother," Andras Visky's Play, at La MaMa Unless you hang out with Medusa, you probably haven't experienced what it feels like to be turned into stone. This novel and disturbing sensation is now on offer at the First Floor Theater at La MaMa. It comes from a girl who is not a gorgon but has the ability to make a person feel as invisible and dispensable as a rock in a quarry. The formula for this transformation, as practiced by the actress Melissa Lorraine Hawkins in Andras Visky's "I Killed My Mother," is fairly basic: She turns her back on her target, disgorges the word "Never" in a primal scream, with a twisted tongue, and then turns around. For all intents and purposes, you, her victim, are now dead, or at any rate no more alive to her than a stone. Portraying Bernadette, a Romanian orphan of mongrel origins, in this stark, poetic production from Theater Y of Chicago, Ms. Hawkins plies her character's grim magic with such angry conviction that you may well pinch your arm to make sure it's still made of flesh. But your emotions, at least, are likely to remain raw and human. How can you not be affected by an act of such supreme and protective loneliness? For what Bernadette is really doing, in a ritual she learned in early childhood from another inmate at the orphanage, is renouncing a world that has already rejected her. She is trying, with her very limited means, to get just a bit of her own back. Directed by Karin Coonrod ("Love's Labor's Lost" and the "Henry VI" plays at the Public), from a translation by Alisha O'Sullivan, "I Killed My Mother" traces the forces that shaped this bleak perspective on the world. Mr. Visky - the resident dramaturge and associate artistic director at the Hungarian Theater of Cluj in Romania - was deported with his family to a gulag in the Baragan Plain in the late 1950s, when he was 2. And much of his theater is informed by what he calls "barracks dramaturgy," which explores the consequences of being raised in captivity. For Bernadette, who was abandoned by her Gypsy mother at birth, this meant growing up in state institutions where supervision and punishment of the young were severe. She formed one intense friendship there, with a boy who called himself Clip (Andrew Hampton Livingston). They bonded when both were forced to wear steel clips on their tongues for speaking disrespectfully. They shared a private language, Clippish, which the boy taught the girl. He also taught her the art of turning people into stones and introduced her to the sanctuary of a land called Never, which exists on "the border between life and not life." Mr. Visky's play, which runs through March 4 at La MaMa, is the story of a relationship that continues long after Bernadette and Clip have been separated forever. Even as she grows into womanhood, Bernadette continues to talk with, and be advised by, an imagined Clip, whose memory has a more palpable hold on her than any of the real people in her life. Those people, by the way, include her birth mother, whom the adult Bernadette seeks out. It probably goes without saying that this is not a joyous reunion. With Peter Ksander's simple, rock-bordered set designed to evoke a bleak field of dreams turned into rubble, "I Killed My Mother" takes place in a sequence-jumbling twilight of time past as recalled and transformed by its heroine. Much of the play occurs during Bernadette's early years at the orphanage, which means that the two adult performers here have the unenviable assignment of portraying little children. Fortunately, Ms. Hawkins and Mr. Livingston forestall the expected whimsy and exaggerated pathos that usually accompany such performances by investing their characters with an immediate and feral fierceness. The adrenaline quotient is high enough to make you forgive Mr. Livingston's actorly accent. The elfin Ms. Hawkins is an almost elemental presence. She is also Theater Y's artistic director, as well as one of its founders. As a young woman, a habitué of a coffee bar of lost souls, her Bernadette seems to carry a shield of fire that is a weapon of both aggression and defense. We're always aware, though, of the child frozen in fear behind the armature, the one who learned that the only safe place to be is a country that she calls Never. I Killed My Mother By Andras Visky; directed by Karin Coonrod; translated by Alisha O'Sullivan; lighting and sets by Peter Ksander; costumes by Oana Botez Ban; stage manager, Ashley Zednick; music by Andrew Livingston, with lullaby lyrics by Mr. Visky. A Theater Y (Chicago) production, presented by La MaMa. At La MaMa's First Floor Theater, 74A East Fourth Street, East Village; (212) 475-7710, lamama.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. WITH: Melissa Lorraine Hawkins (Bernadette) and Andrew Hampton Livingston (Clip).