Review: Mad Forest by Red Dragon Players, Austin High School
by Michael Meigs
Theatre is a lens. The audience and the players look through the action in the playing space to perceive a story in the collective imagination. That story may be entertaining, or trivial, or profound, and the clarity of the vision is directly affected by the skill of the players and the willingness of the audience to engage.
The themes may be familiar. Take vampires, for instance. The century-old thrills of Bram Stoker's 1897 novel got a new boost in 1997 with Buffy. Since then they've proliferated in romance fiction, the Young Adult section in bookstores and libraries, and even Gnap! theatre's Dusk, an ongoing weekly PG-13 improv series down at the Salvage Vanguard now entering its second season. Most of the recent stories about all those undead guys are suggesting the fears and pleasures of adolescent sexuality, an eminently marketable commodity in these United States. And by the way, October is the time of the theatre season when spooks and ghosts and vampires are brought frequently out onto the state.
In contrast, the vampire that appears unexpectedly in the third act of Churchill's Mad Forest is a lot older. Billy Rainey appears tired, tired to death and beyond death, sunk in the discouragement of a Romania that hasn't changed in 500 years, despite the excitements of the 1989 uprising, the overthrow of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, his 90-minute hearing and the summary execution of Ceausescu and his wife Elena. Meeting the vampire in that powerful scene is Brazos Bell as an abandoned dog, desperate for food, companionship and a master. They dialogue and we understand the incomprehension between them. That scene in its magical realism captures the unsolved plight of Romania -- blood, time, history and a vulnerable desire to please.
Director Billy Dragoo set the Red Dragon players a tough task and a challenge: use the lens of the theatre to understand recent history; comprehend that the daily assumptions of life in Texas are contradicted elsewhere in the world, all the time, not just in the Romanian revolution of twenty years ago. Dragoo acknowledges that the AHS company of more than 40 students were "not very fond of the script." Their investigation of it and their strikingly effective interpretation of Churchill's complex work is a tribute both to them and to the director.
We learn from the program that Churchill and a group of student actors traveled to Bucharest in the months following the overthrow. Together with Romanian students they workshopped a theatrical version that became the basis for Churchill's script. Its three acts have a classical unity. We meet a family living under Romanian totalitarianism, hungry, poor and secretive; some have bent to accommodate themselves to the system and others are seeking ways of escape, either physical or mental. The second act is composed entirely of first-person testimonies from witnesses of the violence in Timisoara and elsewhere, giving that history the immediacy of personal experience. The third act, introduced by the cryptic scene of the vampire and the dog, brings the family together some weeks after the revolution, depicting a celebration rife with contradictions, uncertainities and harrangues both political and xenophobic.
Vital throughout these events is the precisely achieved use of silence and rhythm. Gathered at the kitchen table in the opening scene, family members are apprehensive of listeners, and they speak only after turning up the radio to full volume. We see their mouths move but can only guess at their exchanges. Throughout the first two acts the actors speak carefully and deliberately, almost literally weighing their words in their mouths. Act three, following the revolution, offers a moving scene in which family members on a picnic, sprawled in the grass and looking at the sky, offer one by one short phrases describing their burgeoning wishes for the future. Pacing is sublime, suggesting a hesitancy, an overcoming and then a willingness to reveal these desires both to themselves and to one another. The act gathers speed and intensity in a crowded family scene that opens with the shocking spectacle of a gleeful re-enactment of the execution of the Ceausescus. Action flows with all the confusion of a family reunion with many participants, bursting forth with at least three emphatic conversations going on at all times. There is conflict, exuberance, anger and even, unexpectedly, the outbreak of a flailing fight among male members of the family.
In this huge cast there was not a false note anywhere. Not knowing the actors and striving to retain the names of the characters, I inevitably will neglect to mention qualilty performances. Special recognition goes to Aubrey Elenz as Lucia, the sister who escapes to America and finds she cannot stand it; to Catherine Schwartz as sister Florina the nurse, stressed, fragile and beautiful; to Jasmin Weber as the ghost of a grandmother and as a factual, steely-eyed student; to Ria Agarwal and Blake Nixon as the middle-aged parents humiliated by the disappearance of totalitarianism; to Nick Williams as a cocky waiter and as the battered, cringing orphan emblematic of all of Romania's neglected youth; to Madeline Pesoli as the student doctor; to Katherine Schroeder as the house painter; and to somber Rolando Huertas as the priest. Felipe Ramirez as the delirious head-injured patient and later as a ghost comes to symbolize the injury done to Romanians by their own countrymen.
The director and production staff chose not to cake makeup on the faces of those representing the older characters. In a high school production this is a risk and a trade-off, since audiences are looking for signals to identify age differences.
Lighting was superb, particularly in the second act's evocation of the crucial days of the overthrow.
Dragoo is undoubtedly correct when he comments in the program that many audience members will dislike it. The audience was sparse at the Sunday afternoon performance and many seemed stunned rather than enthused.
This was not a jig or a tale of bawdry; it was a deeply earnest, uncomfortable look both at Romania and at individuals very like ourselves.
Highly recommended.
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Mad Forest
by Caryl Churchill
Red Dragon Players, Austin High School
