Each Character Is an Inheritance

If the high-spirited mothers, fathers, sons and daughters of Leslie Ayvazian’s play “Nine Armenians” are any indication, Tolstoy got it wrong. Not all happy families are alike--particularly those that live with the legacy of genocide in their native land.

An exploration of ethnic identity by way of a cozy generational drama, “Nine Armenians” is a loving portrait of one New Jersey Armenian American clan. The play, which opens Thursday at the Mark Taper Forum, is based on the playwright’s own family.

“Nine Armenians” is not, however, only about family history. It also tells the story of the Turkish genocide of the Armenians during World War I, interwoven with the family anecdotes. The past is viewed, however, from a distinctly American perspective.

“This is from the frame of reference of what it is to be an American who has the experience of discovering that I really do have an incredible heritage,” explains the energetic and congenial Ayvazian during an interview at the Taper.

“There’s a feeling of allowing information from my ancestors to come in me and through me to write this play. I tried to find a way to put it on the page, as an American, that was true and heartfelt.”

The New Jersey-based playwright--who, due to an eleventh-hour cast change, will also perform in the play--has worked as an actress since the late 1970s. But with “Nine Armenians,” her writing career has also taken off. She recently opened another play in San Francisco and has two commissions in the works.

The timing of her careers was probably as it was meant to be, says Ayvazian, 48. “I’ve learned some things by this point. It wasn’t like I was starting as a young person. I started at the point where I have a perspective.”

And it is that perspective, combining maturity with a youthful exuberance, that gives her writing its appeal.

“She sees the world with compassion, humor and insight,” says Manhattan Theatre Club Artistic Director Lynne Meadow, who directed “Nine Armenians” in New York and has given Ayvazian a commission for another work. “She doesn’t make fun of people, but she gently sees our foibles.”

Says playwright Richard Greenberg, who has known Ayvazian for a decade, as both friend and collaborator: “There is something about Leslie that remains fresh. She’s incredibly canny and shrewd about the world. Despite that, there’s some part of her that hasn’t been tainted. That’s what people respond to in her writing and her acting.”

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Some writers find their material. Others have it thrust upon them.

In 1989, Ayvazian moved with her husband and then-2-year-old son into the New Jersey house she had just inherited from her grandparents.

“The basement was loaded with all of my grandmother’s wedding clothes, her reviews from when she was a singer, hand-stitched lace nightgowns that were never worn,” she recalls. “There were boxes of my grandfather’s letters and sermons and pictures of my great-grandmother in Armenia.

“I can’t tell you how marvelous it was to go in the basement of my house and open trunks that hadn’t been opened in 80 years. When I moved into this house and it was filled with all this information, I felt literally tugged.”

Five years later, Ayvazian had transformed the inspiration she found in her treasure-trove of family artifacts into the first draft of “Nine Armenians.”

Although some details have been changed, switched or stretched, Ayvazian says the play is “largely autobiographical.” One of the main characters, for example, is a college student named Ani who decides to go to Armenia to find out about her heritage. The character’s experiences are based in part on those of Ayvazian’s sister Andrea, who made a similar pilgrimage.

The play is also filled with the playwright’s own childhood impressions. Ayvazian is the eldest of three daughters born to a physician and his wife. She grew up in New Jersey, where the play is set, until the age of 13, when her father accepted a job as the head of a hospital and moved the family to the small town of Saranac Lake, N.Y., near Lake Placid in the Adirondacks.

Ayvazian wasn’t happy about the move.

“No new family had moved into that town in years,” she recalls. “To move to a town with tons of snow and no Armenians, we were real foreigners.”

These feelings compounded the estrangement Ayvazian already felt from her family history.

“As a child, I didn’t know how to absorb stories, like that my grandmother’s sister was shot in front of her, that my grandmother’s mother was sent on one of these walks until she dropped dead,” she says. “There’s no way that you can absorb that when you’re a privileged, educated American girl.

“No one had history like this. Even the Jews--and there weren’t many in the Adirondacks--have a history that is acknowledged, and that’s a very different thing. To hold on to history that includes genocide and have no one know about it is like an open wound.”

After teen years spent as practically the “only non-bobsledder, the only nonskier” in town, Ayvazian enrolled at the University of Vermont. She bounced from major to major for a couple of years before landing in the theater department, where she spent the remainder of her college career.

Ayvazian graduated in 1970 and joined VISTA, the volunteer domestic Peace Corps, which sent her to Columbus, Ohio, to teach kids to read.

“I had grown up with no black people around me and I went into an entirely black community, unskilled and unprepared but openhearted and idealistic, not unlike Ani,” she says. “I wasn’t very effective.”

After two years, Ayvazian returned to the theater. She began working dinner theater and summer stock jobs and after several years wended her way to New York.

Without connections, however, Ayvazian found acting jobs hard to come by. The situation prompted her to write a show for herself. The result, a multi-character monologue called “Footlights,” was performed at the Vineyard Theatre in 1978 and brought Ayvazian her first taste of success.

That same year, at age 29, Ayvazian married architect Sam Anderson. She settled into life as a working actress, appearing primarily off-Broadway at the Ensemble Studio Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club and elsewhere.

In 1987, Ayvazian became pregnant and was temporarily sidelined from acting. She used the time to write a play, in collaboration with four other actresses (three of whom were pregnant), called “Mama Drama.” The piece ran at the Ensemble Studio Theatre and later at the Cleveland Play House.

After her son Ivan’s birth, Ayvazian returned to acting, albeit not full time.

“Just enough energy was going on in my life as an actress so I could stay focused in that direction instead of going over to really take writing seriously,” she says.

Ayvazian was also trying to have more children.

“I had a series of five miscarriages,” she says. “There were five years of hardship around trying to have a family, during which time I became more insular and separate and began taking less work. I understudied a lot. My hand was in, but I was sort of on the sidelines.”

Two years into this period, Ayvazian and her family moved out of Manhattan and into her grandparents’ house in New Jersey. It was a time, she recalls, when she was feeling unfulfilled by acting.

“I love the theater. I respond to it; I understand it,” she says. “But my work in the theater was ultimately not that satisfying as an actress. I felt that I was doing work I didn’t want to do, that I was being represented in ways I didn’t like, holding up philosophies that didn’t interest me.”

At that point, a serious turn toward writing was the logical step.

“It came down to the matter of deciding to sit down and write a first draft,” she says. “I wanted to start getting behind my own voice.”

Ayvazian completed the first draft of “Nine Armenians” in 1994. The play premiered at the Intiman Theatre in Seattle in July 1995 and was staged at the Manhattan Theatre Club in November 1996.

The critics responded with generally favorable reviews. Linda Winer-Bernheimer of Newsdaydescribed the work as a “preachy but sweetly unpretentious little American-immigrant play.” The New York Times’ Ben Brantley cited both the play’s “high sugar content” and “the real emotional conviction.”

Given the reception, Ayvazian was beginning to feel that she had turned a corner, from actress-playwright to playwright-actress. True as that may have been, however, her acting days turned out to be far from over.

During the first week of performances in New York, cast member Sophie Hayden had to leave suddenly, and Ayvazian found herself stepping into the role of Aunt Louise on five hours’ notice.

“That was an accidental thing,” she says. “The woman who was playing Louise had to leave for a tragedy in her family. It wasn’t an easy thing to do. I did nine performances.”

Ayvazian had no intention of repeating her performance at the Taper. As it turned out, though, she was called upon to do just that. On July 5, Taper Artistic Director Gordon Davidson--who is directing the play and had caught one of Ayvazian’s New York performances--decided to have the playwright replace Brenda Vaccaro in the role of Aunt Louise. Asked to explain his choice, Davidson declined to comment, “because it’s not a public issue.”

“Gordon turned to me and said, ‘Can you? Would you?’ ” Ayvazian says. “I can’t say why. This was Gordon’s decision.”

After checking with her family--and briefly contemplating trying to lose 20 pounds--Ayvazian agreed.

“I did have the thought that if this play continues to have productions, anybody playing Louise is going to think, ‘Is the playwright standing in the wings?’ ” she says.

“But the whole world of the play is in me, not just because I’m an actress but because it’s my story, my family, my heritage. So if anyone had left the play, I would have been the one to look toward.”

Then again, it’s also a particular challenge to play a part you have written.

“It’s a constant exercise to be with the family instead of saying the lines in your head or thinking, ‘That’s an interesting way to say that line,’ ” Ayvazian says.

“It’s a double journey really. It’s remarkable to have the opportunity to be in your own play, particularly in this city, where there’s such a large Armenian community.”

The pleasure of performing in “Nine Armenians” may also help balance the sting of the largely negative reception afforded her most recent play, “Singer’s Boy,” which premiered at American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco in May.

“The truth is, probably the play wasn’t ready to open on that scale,” Ayvazian says of the abstract drama about a woman trapped with her parents in their longtime home, a work she wrote immediately after “Nine Armenians.” “So now I’m in the position of asking for a second chance, because I’m not going to walk away from that play.”

Ayvazian also has the two commissions--for Manhattan Theatre Club and for Wind Dancer, a television production company in the process of launching a theater. And then there are those boxes still waiting in the basement as well.

That’s a continuing task that the playwright turns to whenever she can catch a few days at home.

“Two months ago I went into the basement of my house--I haven’t told this to anybody yet--and there’s this box that I’ve been walking past for eight years right next to the furnace,” Ayvazian says as she begins to weave a tale that clearly delights her. “I walked by and put my hand in it while I was looking off at one of Ivan’s rusted baby tricycles and I pulled out a book.

“The title was ‘The Manhood of the Master,’ and it was old and the spine was all crumbly. I opened it, and on the inside was a typed letter, from my grandfather to me, that was taped--in yellow, falling-off Scotch tape--to the first page of the book.

“What it said was: ‘For Leslie Ann. Sow an act and you will reap a habit. Sow a habit and you will reap a character. Sow a character and you will reap your destiny.’ ”

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* “Nine Armenians,” Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave. Opens Thursday. Tuesdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Ends Aug. 31. $29-$37. (213) 628-2772.