MAD FOREST
Remains Theatre at the Theatre Building
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Churchill went to Romania in 1990 to find that voice. She spent a month documenting the changes that were taking place there (long after the media–the American media at any rate–had tired of them), but what she brought back is a play that’s largely about silences. Greif seems to understand these miserable, enforced silences, and from the very first scene he allows them as much importance as any long speech. Denied the passion of a loud argument, a husband and wife drag on cigarettes–and when they do finally argue, they turn the radio up loud and speak in whispers. We can’t hear them, and neither can any neighbors or nearby Securitate. Their daughter, we eventually discover, wants to marry an American. Later, the girl’s father sits in silence, swallowing his rage while a Securitate member tries to use this information to force him to inform on others. A doctor reprimands a young woman who comes to him for an abortion–“There is no abortion in Romania, I’m shocked that you even think of it”–but during the pauses in their conversation he scribbles an address on a piece of paper and hands it to her in exchange for a thick wad of bills. A long, silent line of people waiting to buy meat are galvanized by a whispered cry of “Down with Ceausescu!” Their eyes hurriedly meet, then, still mute, they avoid one another’s eyes.
These scenes are played with the leisure of the damned: the tension stretches out and settles in for an extended stay. This is the kind of quiet always threatening to explode. Faces are drawn, postures hunched, turmoil bubbles just below the surface. Michael Phillipi’s functional set offers little cheer, and with its constantly shifting walls it’s decidedly sinister and mysterious.
DIARY OF A MADMAN
Writer’s Theatre-Chicago at Cafe Voltaire
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Kim Soren Larsen.
