play. They stayed with Romanian drama students and their families, and worked with about 40 Romanian drama students to develop the play. Wing-Davey even had the chance to interview a former Securitate agent, who became a character in the play. Within two months of their return to England it was in production. Although Churchill was already an established playwright—her plays, such as Top Girls had already played in the West End and on Broadway—it premiered on "a small stage in the Embassy Theatre in North London" performed by the Speech and Drama students. The following autumn it was staged at London's Royal Court Theatre. It had its New York City premiere November 22, 1991 at the Perry Street Theatre. The New York cast included Garret Dillahunt, Tim Blake Nelson, Jake Weber and Calista Flockhart. Critical views Mad Forest received favorable reviews, although some felt it had "rough edges". In Theatre Journal, Stanton B. Garner, Jr. lauded the second act as "remarkable" and described the play as "a powerful account of the confusions and ambiguities attendant upon a revolution that lacked the apparent moral and political clarity" of other revolutions. Garner praised Churchill's script as having "intelligence, craft, and energy". The reviewer praised Churchill for accomplished scene-shaping and gestures that are "richly representative of life under and in the wake of totalitarianism." Frank Rich, reviewing the New York premiere, called the play "just as surprising, inventive and disturbing as the author's 'Top Girls' and 'Fen.'" There is nothing kneejerk about Mad Forest [...] a full 18 months after the London opening, the piece has not dated the way that newspaper accounts of the same history already have. … The technique of Mad Forest is elliptical and atmospheric … In Act III … paroxysms of xenophobia and paranoia … often seem even more frightening than the sullen episodes of repression that preceded them." Malcolm L. Johnson of Hartford Courant lauded the work as a "harrowing, stirring, sometimes overpowering look at Romania" that "brings together disparate styles [...] to create political theater of truly epic proportions and revelatory meaning." Johnson wrote, "While 'Mad Forest' sometimes works abstractly [...] ultimately this is a clear, even familiar play." Anna Rosenstein of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette criticized the play as "disconnected". Rosenstein also stated that the second act, "a sort of living newspaper version of the revolution," is weaker than the first and third acts. Charles Isherwood