Silence – the shame it projects, the trauma it reflects, the secrets it conceals – constitutes the central protagonist of Forum Theatre’s Mad Forest, Caryl Churchill’s grim play about the impact of Romania’s 1989 revolution on its psychologically shattered population. The production’s most dramatic moments are its most muted: a nervous glance, an awkward pause, an unspoken plea for help, a frantic conversation muffled by a radio playing discordantly jingoistic anthems to the regime. When emotions finally penetrate the surface, they induce not catharsis but a sense of confusion and lost possibility – a realization that totalitarianism had plundered not only their bodies but also their souls.
Irina (Charlotte Akin) and Bogdan (Matt Dougherty) in the shadow of Nicolae Ceaușescu's oppressive regime. Photo by Melissa Blackall.
The pace of Mad Forest is slow, subtle, and methodical, but it rewards patience and a keen attention to detail. Directed with restrained solemnity by Michael Dove, the play consists of a series of interlocking vignettes that portray a society crippled by the stifling grasp of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s totalitarian regime. The Securitate, the omnipresent secret service that monitors the dictator’s subjects for the slightest traces of insubordination, generates ubiquitous fear that forces the hapless population to recede inward and become accustomed to residing in a state of otherworldly repression that borders on madness.
The play illustrates the regime’s perverse impact on the population through several fantasy sequences that serve as allegories for Communist Romania’s voiceless horrors. In perhaps the most jarring of them, a dog (a superb Jim Jorgensen) entreats a vampire (played with perfect malice by Ashley Ivey) to adopt him as his master, only to find that serving the undead (Ceaușescu’s regime, that is) exacts a terrible price. The scene, which in the hands of lesser actors and directors might have descended into camp, amounts to a haunting fable illuminating the predatory relationship between a totalitarian government and its doomed subjects.
On the surface, the 1989 revolution extinguished that relationship, but the show’s second half, which chronicles the aftermath of Ceaușescu’s fall, illustrates the awful, seemingly undying aftershocks of his bloody reign. Silence gives way to talk, talk gives way to barely repressed emotions, and barely repressed emotions give way to visceral temperamental outbursts that threaten to consume the play’s protagonists. The production depicts the psychological development of its characters with a discerning awareness that Ceaușescu’s demise ended one tragedy but inaugurated another: the post-traumatic shock of a people struggling to make sense of its experiences and find a new way forward.
For Flavia (Rose McConnell), a schoolteacher responsible for indoctrinating her students with the regime’s propaganda, post-revolution Romania renders her a woman without a cause. (“All I was trying to do was teach correctly,” she says desperately. “Isn’t history what’s in the history book? Let them give me a new book, I’ll teach that.”) For Lucia (Dana Levanovsky), the revolution unveils long-simmering racial animosities that complicate her romantic altercations with two men, one American and one Hungarian. For Gabriel (Joe Brack), who winds up in the hospital with a broken leg after battling Ceaușescu’s forces during the uprising, ambiguities over the revolution’s objectives and methods cast a shadow over his putative heroism.
Rodica (Rose McConnell) is having nightmares about the revolution (with Ashley Ivey and David Winkler). Photo by Melissa Blackall.
Mad Forest’s strong performances (the 11-member cast, each of whom plays multiple roles, also includes Matt Dougherty, Charlotte Akin, Stephanie Rosewell, Alexander Strain, Mark Halpern, and David Winkler) and intelligent direction provide a powerful, unsparing, and vivid portrait of life under totalitarianism that resonates beyond the Romanian experience. The final scene, a long-awaited wedding, foreshadows the susceptibility of the country’s next generation to the traumas inflicted on its parents. Instead of silence, however, the protagonists’ offspring face the unrestrained emotional combustibility of a shellshocked society confronting a battered, liberated and altogether cacophonous world.
Running time: 2 hours and 30 minutes, with one 10-minute intermission.
Mad Forest plays through Oct. 15 at Forum Theatre – 8641 Colesville Road, in Silver Spring, MD. For tickets, call (240) 644-1100 or purchase them online.
Tzvi Kahn is a writer living in D.C. and a graduate student in Middle East studies at The George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs.
