A ‘Mad Forest’ of Chaos and Hope

In 1990, British playwright Caryl Churchill traveled to Romania with a director and a troupe of actors to find material for a play about the everyday lives of people both before and after the execution of tyrants Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu in December 1989. “Mad Forest” is the result of that trip. As staged at the Matrix Theatre, the play delivers the tumult of that time into the audience’s personal space in a production that literally encircles the spectators and thrusts them into a panorama of hope, fear and paranoia.

The theater has been gutted and reconfigured for the play. Seated on two sets of facing benches, the audience twists and turns to follow the action, which plays out in every corner of the room as well as on the cobblestoned stage in the middle. The surreal and chaotic nature of life under Ceausescu is echoed in the very fabric of “Mad Forest,” a play in which actors go quickly from role to role, playing humans, animals, angels and children, and where scenes are but slices of life--people piling into a trolley, waiting for bread, speaking in code in their own homes in case they are being “overheard.”

Each scene is announced in English and Romanian by a simple travel book phrase, such as “Who Has a Match?” or “We Are Buying Meat.” The play intentionally avoids a shapely arc; it meanders through vignettes of Romanian life, some fascinating, some less so, most of them realistic, some of them comically supernatural. Nothing is over-explained and it is up to the audience to gather up the fragments and make something of them.

“Mad Forest” provides insight into how people find ways to trust one another in an atmosphere of almost total paranoia, or how a common enemy binds people together. You may not feel, however, that you’ve had a coherent experience, although bits of brilliance will glance off you and fly off to some other realm where you can’t follow.

Director Stephanie Shroyer delivers those glancing blows with authority. With the help of a solid cast, she finds meaning in Churchill’s willful mysteriousness, rhythm in her elliptical universe. Her work is particularly good in the play’s strongest section--Act 1, which portrays life before the revolution.

In the first scene, an older couple (George Murdock, Marian Mercer) turn up the radio and whisper furiously. The conditions under which they fight tell us more about them than their inaudible argument possibly could. Their daughter Lucia (Sarah Zinsser) brings home four precious eggs and some cigarettes, no doubt unlawfully gotten. As the family celebrates its good fortune with silent, joyful smoking, the father gets up and smashes his egg on the floor. Another daughter, Florina (Kaitlin Hopkins), tries to save what’s left by scraping the tiny glop into a bowl.

The economy and observation in this silent vignette are what makes Churchill such a great dramatist. Yet her full power is felt only sporadically in this play. The play’s second act, in which the characters relate where they were and what they saw during the capture and execution of the Ceausescus, is tedious. And the final act, which describes the paranoia and confusion that linger after the dictator is gone, often seems as wayward as the country itself, trying desperately and blindly to repair.

As is usual at the Matrix, the play is double-cast, so that the actors change nightly. Standouts in the cast I saw: Cotter Smith, lackluster as a glum architect, is riveting when he steps into the role of an abject dog who begs a vampire to adopt him on the dark Romanian street. Zinsser is vivid as the wilder of the two sisters, who goes briefly to America and finds that “someone has shined every carrot,” and Hopkins shows porcelain strength as the more cautious and selfless sister.

As the schoolteacher Flavia, Marilyn McIntrye was beautifully wry and controlled as she taught her class about “the great personality of Nicolae Ceausescu.” George Murdock played with conviction both the aging, egg-breaking father in the first scene and an hyperactive 8-year-old orphan in the third.

The handsome, dark production is designed by Deborah Raymond and Dorian Vernacchio and by lighting designer J. Kent Inasy. One has to credit the director for the fact that the entire cast begins to look Slavic after a while.

In the “new” Romania, a couple once separated by politics is now free to marry. A brawl (staged by fight director Steve Rankin) breaks out during the wedding celebration and someone is heard to insult a Hungarian guest. The only truth that emerges from the confusion and overlapping dialogue is that new scapegoats must be found when the leader that united a country in hatred is gone. In her elliptically brilliant way, Churchill shows us there is no clear path out of a mad forest.

* “Mad Forest,” Matrix Theatre, 7657 Melrose Ave., Thursday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2:30 and 7 p.m. Ends Sept. 1. $20-$22. (213) 852-1445. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.

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Mad Forest

The actors play many roles, among them:

George Murdock/William Dennis Hunt: Bogdan Vladu

Claudette Nevins/Marian Mercer: Irina Vladu

Sarah Zinsser/Lisa Akey: Lucia Vladu

Julia Campbell/Kaitlin Hopkins: Florina Vladu

Scott Allan Campbell/Gregg Henry/John Walcutt: Gabriel Vladu

Nancy Linehan Charles/Marilyn McIntyre: Flavia Antonescu

Cotter Smith/Dave Higgins: Mihai Antonescu

Robin Gammell/Lawrence Pressman/Raye Birk: Vampire

Raphael Sbarge/Kurt Deutsch/Christian Svensson: Radu Antonescu

Matt McKenzie/Don McManus: Ianos

Joel Swetow/Dave Higgins/Time Winters: Doctor