- Mad Forest
"Mad Forest: A Play from Romania" is a play by English playwright
Caryl Churchill . The three acts occur, respectively, shortly before, during, and shortly after theRomania n Revolution of 1989. The play is mostly written in English, but has several passages in Romanian, including having the cast sing "Deşteaptă-te, române! ".The play
The first and third acts—"Lucia's Wedding" and "Florina's Wedding"—are dramatic fictions. The second act—"December"—is based on interviews conducted by the playwright, a director, and ten Romanian student actors.Program, production of "Mad Forest" at the Penthouse Theater,
University of Washington ,Seattle, Washington , February-March 2007.]The title alludes to a passage in "A Concise History of Romania" by
Andrei Oţetea and Andrew MacKenzie that says thatBucharest stands on land that used to be an impenetrable forest "impenetrable by the foreigner who did not know the paths", known to "the horsemen of thesteppe " as "Teleorman — Mad Forest" ("seeCodrii Vlăsiei ").The first act is set in
Communist Romania , several months before the Revolution, and establishes an atmosphere permeated by theSecuritate (Romania's secret police), in which one young woman's engagement to an American draws scrutiny on all of her family and associates. The second act—using the same actors to portray an entirely different set of characters—recounts the events ofDecember 21 –December 25 1989 in Bucharest. The third act, set largely in a hospital where one of the characters from Act I is recovering from injuries sustained during the fighting engage matters such as Romanian perceptions of the Hungarian minority and many conflicting views as the extent to which the events December 1989 and the rise ofIon Iliescu constituted a "coup d'état " versus arevolution .While much of the play is naturalistic, it also includes several surreal passages: minor characters include an
angel , avampire , and aghost .Performance history
In March 1990, commissioned by
London 'sCentral School of Speech and Drama , Caryl Churchill traveled to Bucharest with directorMark Wing-Davey and ten Speech and Drama students to research the play. They stayed with Romanian drama students and their families, and worked with about 40 Romanian drama students to develop the play. Wing-Davey even had the chance to interview a former Securitate agent, who became a character in the play. Within two months of their return to England it was in production.Mel Gussow , "English Theater Quick on Political Trigger", "New York Times",July 25 ,1990 . p. C11]Alex Witchel , "'Mad Forest' comes to Perry Street", "New York Times",September 13 ,1991 . p. C2 ] [Richard Bernstein , "Capturing History: From Coup to Stage", "New York Times", December 1, 1991. p. H6]Although Churchill was already an established playwright—her plays, such as "
Top Girls " had already played in the West End and on Broadway—it premiered on "a small stage in theEmbassy Theatre in North London" performed by the Speech and Drama students. The following autumn it was staged at London'sRoyal Court Theatre . It had itsNew York City premiereNovember 22 ,1991 at the Perry Street Theatre. American actressCalista Flockhart was in the New York cast.Frank Rich , "After Ceauşescu, Another Kind of Terror", "The New York Times ",December 5 ,1991 p. C15. [http://theater2.nytimes.com/mem/theater/treview.html?res=9D0CE5DB173AF936A35751C1A967958260 Accessible online - requires registration] .]Critical views
The play received almost universally favorable reviews, although some felt it had "rough edges".
Frank Rich , reviewing the New York premiere, wrote, "There is nothing kneejerk about 'Mad Forest'… a full 18 months after the London opening, the piece has not dated the way that newspaper accounts of the same history already have. … The technique of 'Mad Forest' is elliptical and atmospheric … In Act III … paroxysms of xenophobia and paranoia … often seem even more frightening than the sullen episodes of repression that preceded them."Rich remarks that the "conventional political
satire " in the early part of the play is later overwhelmed by "a more surreal form of theater": it introduces avampire , anarchangel who collaborated with the fascistIron Guard in the 1930s, questions (initially through the vehicle of a paranoid character, but later through others) whether what occurred in Romania was a revolution or a putsch, and finally ends in "drunken revelry and sadistic, retributive violence."References
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