While NT Live and other venues have offered archival productions to watch during COVID, a scattering of plays have been adapted to the new normal of digital presentations. Most companies have given readings for benefit fundraisers, but Bard College’s theater department attempted something different with its Zoom-based staging of Caryl Churchill’s 1990, “play from Romania,” Mad Forest. Director Ashley Tata and her student cast had begun rehearsals when the pandemic struck. Rather than scrap their collaboration, the company formed their production via Zoom meetings, with sets, lights, and props in the individual homes of the actors and projections and live editing from the tech crew, creating a hybrid of live theater and video. After one virtual performance, Theater for a New Audience has joined as a co-producer for a limited run of broadcasts.
The result is rough and raw with technical glitches occasionally causing screen freezes during the performance viewed. Churchill’s splintered script combines realism and fantasy to chronicle the journey of two fractious families during the 1989 Romanian revolution. Spirits, vampires, angels, and talking dogs comment on the clans’ varied reactions to the fall of a dictatorial government and an uncertain future. The acting is unpolished but earnest. The intentions are there, but unfocused. With the multitude of screens and the cast doubling up in many roles, it is difficult to follow the connections of the characters and their stories. But the young actors infuse their characterizations with intensity, and the fascinating editing of blue screens and fractured settings adds a layer of alienation to this tale of an alienated people, unmoored by disrupted politics and history. In one haunting moment, the video images of a nurse and the ghost of a dead patient merge in a dance of life and death, perfectly capturing the disjointed state of the Romanians in 1989 and the whole world in 2020.
