Mad Forest

On Christmas Day 1989, the people of Romania violently overturned the rule of Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who had transformed Romania into a police state. He and his wife Elena Ceausescu were ousted and executed. The executions were filmed and TV clips were shown shortly afterward to a national television audience.

Three months later, British playwright Caryl Churchill went to Bucharest with a group of students from the London School of Drama to see first-hand a society still groping its way forward through the chaotic aftermath of revolution. Their aim was to observe a nation in post-revolutionary turmoil and to make a play about what they saw.
Mad Forest is the result.

Churchill’s kaleidoscopic portrait of this extraordinary chapter in world history combines a fictional storyline with actual eyewitness accounts of the revolution and paints a world in which sudden freedom is both intoxicating and terrifying. The play depicts two families enduring the oppression of Ceausescu’s regime. It captures their experiences in the revolution as well as the aftermath of political confusion that the people of Romania have endured and continue to endure today. Mad Forest is an incisive portrait of a society in turmoil. Scott Hafso directs.

Added Performances:
Sunday, February 25 at 7:30pm
Tuesday, February 27 at 7:30pm

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