- Edwin Gérard-Hamamdjian
Playwright and Director
|
Front, left to right : Actors
Burck Kartalian, franck Beaulieu, Anna Der Nersessian. Back, left
to right : Michael Goodfriend and director Edwin Gerard Hamamdjian
Photo: Alexis Miles
|
- As A woman Sees It -
by Mireille Kalfayan
- Beast on the Moon
"I see the expression of a Turk on your face," cries out Seta
to husband Aram Thomassian when he tries to get his 15 year old
new bnde into the bedroom. Mr. Thomassian, as Seta refers to him,
is a photographer who has escaped the genocide and has settled in
Milwaukee. Seta is a mail order bride from the orphanage in Istanbul.
The play opens in 1920, in a modest home in Wisconsin, where Aram
Thomassian brings giggling and nervous Seta from the train station
into her new home, a new land, a new life Thomassian is set on building
a new family to "replace" the massacred members of his father's
family. Seta has some grave tragic memories of her own. As the "man"
tries to convince the young "girl" on many attempts of pregnancy,
the drama unfolds on their relationship as husband and wife, and
as Armenians, in pain and hope from the genocide.
Although the strong accent projecting these immigrants' struggle
with a new language, in a new land, sounds forced and labored in
the beginning of the play, disrupting the understanding of parts
of the dialogue (we seem to get used to it by the middle of the
play), it does add a little to the atmosphere of primitivity and
naivete in the wonder of a new start, in a new culture. As young
Seta grows in maturity, and the couple's home decor and financial
situation improves, so does their relationship grow in awareness
bringing our own souls to its breadth of universal understanding.
The play is written by Richard Kalinoski with such intricate depth
of symbolism and human universal breath I still wish an Armenian
would have written it. It is directed by Edwin Gerard Hamamdjian
with greatest sensitivity and attention to its symbolic instances
and human spiritual strivings, in an aura of nostalgic Armenian
songs and music, every scene is brought home - straight to the heart.
The actress Anna Der Nersesian, is simply beautiful. and so very
much at home in her role and on stage, she makes you part of her
family. The actor Michael Goodfiiend looks and acts so convincingly
Armenian we had to question him if he were not truly Armenian. The
narrator is Buck Kartalian, whose whimsical appearance and disappearance
on stage, as he leads the characters in and out of the scenes and
weaves the story for us, sustains the plot on an ethereal plane,
where we are invited intermittently to take part and yet gently
pushed back to observe. It's like holding at the other end of a
chord, where you're pulled in then let to pull out, all the while
kept connected with equivalent interest and involvement.
There is also the character of a little Italian orphan boy, played
by either Franck Beaulieu or Giancarlo Canale, who adds a freshness
as well as a magically universal dimension to the play. I do not
wish to reveal its symbolic implication. It's a dimension we need
to discover for ourselves. Suffice it to say, it is this young boy's
presence that heals the relationship between the couple and unfolds
the pain and grief of the genocide, providing us with a mirror unto
our soul, a picture of hope into our future.
I would like to invite, and urge you all to go discover and ex-
perience that dimension for yourself, as a human and as an Armenian.
At the
Fountain Theater, at 5060 Fountain Avenue (comer of Normandie),
until September 24 (Thursday through Sunday) Tel- (323) 663-1525.
.
|
