Forum Theatre finds its way through the deep woods of Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest, a fantasia on the events in Romania before, during, and after December, 1989, when the rule of Nicolae Ceaușescu was removed.
Acts 1 (before) and 3 (after) unfold in short, elliptical scenes, often wordless. A priest might converse with an angel, or a vampire with a dog, or merely a father with his wife, the family radio turned up to deafening volume lest the security police listen in. Everywhere is uncertainty: who fought whom during the regime change, and with what motive? Someone says, “we don’t know who we know,” while another explains an architect’s artifice of arranging for sunlight in an enclosed space.
The crux of the play is the compelling Act 2, in which the ensemble cast directly address the audience with the house lights turned up, each actor performing a single character’s monologue of what happened that December. From time to time, the voices overlap, bringing forth the image from Churchill’s epigraph, in which ancient Bucharest’s wooded plain, braided by multiple streams, was seen by outsiders as a place of madness. Matt Dougherty has an especially effective turn as a bulldozer driver and construction worker (on the job that became the Palace of the Parliament) sidelined by the political upheaval.
- Mad Forest, by Caryl Churchill, directed by Michael Dove, Forum Theatre, Silver Spring, Md.