Stage

...And that something is the unrelenting puritanism formers with American actors...

...in act 3, cut menacing in his stereotypical black cape, carries on a loose from the unstable stability of a corrupt world in which conversation with a dog, played impressively by a they know the limits of possibility, they find not the promised naked actor on all fours...

...Dietz, unlike Churchill, chooses not to be in the Joint Stock Theatre Group tradition, a collective creation...

...These concerned with the before and after of the Romanian revolu- two characters, particularly the senator, suggest that the play tion...

...The real business of the acts is n one of the most unusual and quietly theatrical scenes something else again...

...In 1990, she and director Mark Wing-Davey took a group might have gone for something more complex than the laughs of actors to Bucharest, where they interviewed people, studied it generated...

...the setting and much of the action (it takes place before, dur- Who is running the new one...

...disquieting...

...Hungry and in need of Days is fairly simple compared to Mad a protective master (Christopher McCann's reiterated high Forest...

...olution or a staged event which allowed the old rulers (minus Nor are these fantasy scenes simply theatrical games as some Ceausescu, of course) to hold onto power...

...The vampire (after all, Transylvania is in class, ethnic, and gender differences-reemerge...

...Churchill is ical-school base in Grenada to run a variety of scams...

...few extra bodies...

...With Mad piece of goods not needing his concern-who is using his medForest it is easier to keep the big picture in mind...

...Days is a satire about the American whine, "I'm your dog," provides one of the memorable mo- invasion of Grenada, but its main target is ments in the production), he finally convinces the vampire to not the event itself but the spin doctorstake him, which the vampire does by biting him on the neck, speech writers, White House advisers-who try to find the making him-so far as I know-the first undead dog in vam- right words and video images to make an heroic occasion of pire literature...

...of the man...

...Look at any Romania) finds the contemporary chaos particularly congenial newspaper: Mad Forest may be set in Romania, but it is a play for him since no one is likely to pay that much attention to a for our time-any place, any day...

...there is something about Malcolm X that resists the black film- The New York production replaced the original researcher-permaker Spike Lee...

...The play ends with of the more playful doings in Churchill's popular Cloud Nine the wedding of Florina and Radu, but the supposedly happy ocseemed to be...

...This documentary-style scene is framed by two acts in each of which there is a wedding involvOVERBITE & UNDERDONE ing the same two fictional families...

...RICHARD ALLEVA is a static affair in which the actors introduce the people for whom they speak and let them tell what they saw, heard, did (or avoidSTAGE ed seeing, hearing, doing) during the few days which brought Ceausescu's reign to an end...

...In act 1 we get a picture of a society in in Caryl Churchill's Mad Forest, a vampire, suavely which people survive by deceit, chicanery, bribery...

...At least, until December 1989...

...Almost everyone in the play-in so far as they watching the two characters do their blood-sucking mas- are people with more substance than the cardboard cutout of ter/willing slave routine, I saw a metaphor for Nicolas Ceau- President Ronald Reagan that is used in one scene-is greedy, sescu and the Romanians, whom he liked to think of as his loving ambitious, manipulative...

...The playgoers are allied with the satirist here, The result is this play, clearly a Churchill work, but a product never his target...

...of a play understands what is going on and of course has to die in misof hers I saw in London a few years ago, all I remember is that directed shelling...

...And who would check for teeth marks on the neck...

...Who was responsible for the old regime...

...acters-at least as they were played in the production I saw Perhaps I have given too much space to a single, short scene, at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia-were complete caribut-although Churchill is interested in the overarching sweep catures...

...These characters-like the land they assumed lay beyond the dictator, but a morass of susArchangel Michael, who appears to a priest, and the dead grand- picion and accusation which turns friend against friend, chilmother with whom one of the characters communicates-are dren against parents, lovers against one another...

...The scene is funny, in a skin-crawly way, but a tragic farce...

...The dog is one of the victims of the situation, thrown out s political plays go, Steven Dietz's Halcyon by owners who can no longer feed him...

...With only a few exceptions, the charpeople...

...They reflect the political and moral confusion casion turns into a free-for-all in which all the old hatredswithin the country...

...We get to know the char'MAD FOREST' & 'HALCYON DAYS' acters, to check their animosities, their longings, their distress, and to follow the minimal plot in each case (the marriage of Lucia to an American in act 1, the marriage of her sister and her art-student boyfriend in act 3...

...It cozies up to the audience with its we-all-knowthe revolution and its effects, tried to absorb the atmosphere...

...and a liberal senator who is trapped between a man was obsessed by a pig that was played by an elegant young his horror at the invasion and his fear for his son-a nasty dancer, suggesting obsession more than pigginess...

...don't-we tone...

...You don't hire a hipster, no matter how talented, to The long second act, which depends heavily on the interviews, make a movie about Savonarola...

...Was the revolution really a reving, and after the 1989 revolution in Romania) are real enough...

...Of those exceptions, the most important are a Grenadan of her plays and in the ideas, usually political, that inform them- woman (the play's only black), sharp of tongue and eye, who I find myself thinking of her work in bits and pieces...

...They live amid Churchillian reminders that this is not a realistic play although questions not answers...

...GERALD WEALES 20: 15 January 1993 Commonweal...