ABSTRACT
In the fall of 1991, the New York Theatre Workshop presented the American premiere of Mad Forest, Caryl Churchill’s 1990 play about the Romanian Revolution, at the Greenwich Village Perry Street Theatre. The production, directed by Mark Wing-Davey, was provocative in its strategies of audience address. Denied the comfort and invisibility of conventional modern spectatorship, the audience was made to share the physical demands to which the play’s characters are subject. Wing-Davey and his set designer made resourceful use of the intimate seating of the Perry Street Theatre: uncomfortable chairs and benches comprised the front row, and these were extended into the rubble that surrounded the edge of the stage (by the end of the play, several spectators were sitting on the floor amid this rubble). The radio music in the first scene was turned up to a painfully high decibel level, and the continual lighting of cheap cigarettes subjected the audience to a cloud of acrid smoke. As Wing-Davey explained in a discussion following the performance, Mad Forest deals with the physical and cognitive discomforts involved in encountering a society as removed as that of Romania. These strategies for physicalizing reception paralleled the text’s concern with the linguistic barriers to this kind of intercultural contact: Churchill specifies that each scene in Acts 1 and 3 opens with a subtitle spoken in Romanian, then English, then Romanian again, as if even the drama itself must contend with the cumbersome mediation of language texts and phrase books.
