MAD FOREST
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Caryl Churchill’s play Mad Forest, in its Chicago premiere at Stage Left Theatre, tries to capture some of the absurdity, the fear, and the frustrations of the Romanian revolution. Structured in three acts that represent events before, during, and after the revolution, Mad Forest has some strong material, some solid performances, and the advantage of topicality, but the current production is confusing and cold. When the curtain drops we’ve learned a few historical tidbits, but we don’t really care about the revolution, Romania, or any of Churchill’s characters.
The first act is a series of vignettes showing the quotidian horror of Romanian life. Each scene is introduced by an audiotape of a Romanian voice, with the title repeated in Romanian and then English by a live actor. What we see are young men telling drunken jokes about the dictator, families turning up radios and whispering so as not to be heard by the microphones planted everywhere, government operatives bribing ordinary citizens into spying on their neighbors.
The ideas behind these symbols–moral bankruptcy, the randomness of the killing–should have come to fruition in the third act, but instead Churchill just seems in a hurry to get it over with. With the Ceausescus out of the way, Romanians have no one to hate but each other. Everyone questions the process of the revolution: How could the men who had supported Ceausescu for nearly a quarter century become reformers overnight? How many people were killed at Timisoara? Where are the bodies? Where did the guns come from on December 21? Why was Ceausescu killed so quickly?
