Mad Forest: A Play from Romania is a play by English playwright Caryl Churchill. The three acts occur, respectively, shortly before, during, and shortly after the Romanian Revolution of 1989. The play is mostly written in English, but has several passages in Romanian, including having the cast sing Romania's national anthem, "Deşteaptă-te, române!". The title alludes to a passage in A Concise History of Romania by Andrei Oţetea and Andrew MacKenzie that says that Bucharest stands on land that used to be an impenetrable forest "impenetrable by the foreigner who did not know the paths", known to "the horsemen of the steppe" as "Teleorman — Mad Forest" (see Codrii Vlăsiei). The play The first act ("Lucia's Wedding") and the third act ("Florina's Wedding) are dramatic fictions. The second act ("December") is based on interviews conducted by the playwright, a director, and ten Romanian student actors. The first act is set in Communist Romania, several months before the Revolution, and establishes an atmosphere permeated by the Securitate (Romania's secret police), in which one young woman's engagement to an American draws scrutiny on all of her family and associates. The second act—using the same actors to portray an entirely different set of characters—recounts the events of December 21–December 25, 1989 in Bucharest. The third act, set largely in a hospital where one of the characters from Act I is recovering from injuries sustained during the fighting engage matters such as Romanian perceptions of the Hungarian minority and many conflicting views as the extent to which the events December 1989 and the rise of Ion Iliescu constituted a coup d'état versus a revolution. While much of the play is naturalistic, it also includes several surreal passages: minor characters include an angel, a vampire, and a ghost. Frank Rich remarks that the "conventional political satire" in the early part of the play is later overwhelmed by "a more surreal form of theater": it introduces a vampire; an archangel, who collaborated with the fascist Iron Guard in the 1930s, questions (initially through the vehicle of a paranoid character, but later through others) whether what occurred in Romania was a revolution or a putsch; and finally ends in "drunken revelry and sadistic, retributive violence." Performance history In March 1990, commissioned by London's Central School of Speech and Drama, Caryl Churchill traveled to Bucharest with director Mark Wing-Davey and ten Speech and Drama students to research the