Sign’s Language Stirs Complaints

To some drivers on the busy Glendale street, it was a strange and unsettling sight, the sort of thing that makes you do a double take, maybe even pull over to the side of the road.

The familiar marquee at Glendale Community College, where school plays and football games are usually announced, was filled with the odd loops and curves of a foreign alphabet. No translation followed, just two dates, cryptically proclaiming some event, as if to tease those who didn’t understand.

People in Glendale are used to seeing signs in Armenian. After all, in “the Jewel City” there are Armenian restaurants, Armenian insurance agencies and Armenian used-car dealers. But this was different; this was a public community college. And to some English-speaking residents, this was taking things a bit too far. They flooded the college with angry calls.

“I’m extremely displeased. I’m offended,” said one voice on the college’s telephone message system, “to see that the college is stooping to this level and letting the Armenian groups have their way.”

Ken Gray, chairman of the college’s theater department, plays back the taped message and shakes his head. Then his lips form a very slight, sardonic smile.

Actually, he explains, the ugly controversy was just a misunderstanding. None of this would have happened if it hadn’t been for the “Fathers’ Follies” production put on by the PTA of a local elementary school.

But more about that later.

The marquee was announcing the June 27-July 12 run of “Who Now Remembers?” a Glendale College production that explores the events of the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1923.

“The kids are trying to do something noble,” Gray said. “And then there’s this reaction.”

Consider first the plight of cast member R.J. DeWitt, who is in charge of putting up and taking down the letters on the marquee. He has already been up that ladder four times, taking down and putting up Armenian characters, then putting up English ones, and then Spanish ones too, because professor Gray, in a sarcastic retort to the angry callers, decided to spell out “Who Now Remembers?” in three languages, not just one.

“It’s a pain,” DeWitt said. Each switch involves two hours work, minimum, under a hot sun.

Poor DeWitt had to go up there again Monday, taking down all three versions of “Who Now Remembers?” for a day to put up letters that spelled something entirely different: Welcome President Clinton.

The commander in chief spoke at the college quad Tuesday. Sometime after Clinton’s motorcade had sped away, De Witt had to climb the ladder and arrange the marquee letters one last time, to spell out “Who Now Remembers?” and “Quien Recuerda?” and the Armenian characters that read, phonetically, “Ohv Kuh Hish Shay Heemah.”

Putting up the Armenian characters had been an attempt to reach out to the Armenian community, whose response to the play during an earlier run had been overwhelmingly positive. “It’s our most successful production ever,” Gray said.

Armenian marquee letters were not readily available, so Gilbert Baghramian, the play’s set and lighting designer, made some from scratch. He downloaded an Armenian font off the Internet, went to a hardware store to buy Lucite, then transferred the font to the Lucite, a process that took two days.

“The play is about the Armenian genocide. Most of the Glendale community is Armenian,” said Baghramian, 24. (Actually, Armenians make up about a quarter of Glendale’s 180,000 residents.) “With the sign being in English, if an Armenian passed by, he wouldn’t know what the play is about.”

The theater company wanted to put the name of the playwright (Rideaux Baldwin, who happens to be is African American) and the title and the subtitle of the play in both Armenian and English. Unfortunately, the sign had room for only five lines. No problem: They simply put English on the north side of the sign, Armenian on the south.

This generated just a few calls of protest, apparently from people driving north who saw only the Armenian, not bothering, as Gray put it, “to look in their rear-view mirrors and see that there was English on the other side.”

Still, all was relatively quiet until the annual “Fathers’ Follies” came up.

The Verdugo Woodlands PTA wanted to announce its show on the sign, so Gray told the students to take down the Armenian characters and put “Fathers’ Follies” on the south side.

For some reason there was a mix-up, and the students took down English letters on the north side, replacing them with “Fathers’ Follies” in English and leaving the Armenian on the south side. The events had different dates, both in English, and passersby must have realized one wasn’t a translation of the other.

Then the phone really started to ring.

“I had no idea what the heck it said,” said an even-tempered voice on campus voice mail. (The caller said he was deeply offended but wouldn’t leave his name “for fear of reprisals” from the Armenian community). The voice went on to suggest putting the sign in English, “so that all the people have a chance to read it,” and ended by saying, “Thank you for letting me get this off my chest.”

There were other calls that were not so civil. One caller rattled off a series of ethnic slurs, including an especially nasty reference to the origins of some Armenian immigrants.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Baghramian said. “I couldn’t listen [to the messages] all the way through.”

The angry calls have prompted Gray to take the dictionary definition of “xenophobia” and pass it around to his student cast: “fear and hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything that is strange or foreign.”

It is a lesson he hopes they will remember.