‘Armenians’ Is Generic Despite Trappings

“Nine Armenians,” Leslie Ayvazian’s 1995 play about nine (American) Armenians, is heartwarming, full of family love, ethnic pride and Armenian history. But that doesn’t make it a good play.

At the Mark Taper Forum, where the play opened Wednesday night, the audience laughs in recognition at the antics of the family members. Dad’s in the car waiting, but no one else seems to be able to leave Grandmother’s house. They are too busy embracing, forgetting a container of some delicious Armenian dish that someone has wrapped in foil, forgetting to go to the bathroom, forgetting to tell someone something.

Though the family is recognizable--down to the bustling, hypochondriac aunt who will outlive them all (played credibly by Ayvazian herself)--they are also generic. Lively, yes, but generic in the deeper sense of rooted character.

This is true, even though the play is about the characters’ relationship to their roots. The playwright announces as much in the first scene, when the grandfather (Hal Robinson) asks his 15-year-old granddaughter Ginya (Tiffany Ellen Solano), “Are they teaching you Armenian history in school?” And then he proceeds to impart some.

It is not Ginya, but her older sister Ani (Sarah Koskoff) who feels compelled to visit the country of her grandparents. Ani announces her intentions while delivering a eulogy at a funeral. She picks up her grandfather’s theme, telling the assembled facts of which they are already aware: “And now the Armenians are starving and no one knows.”

Her father tries to stop her by yelling more history at her: “My father was forced to administer to the Turkish soldiers after a day of killing Armenians!” They are a family of yellers, as someone points out. They are also a family that tells one another things not necessarily out of organic necessity but because the playwright wants the audience to know.

We know Ani is an activist before we meet her. She is absent from the first scene, we are told, because she is spending the night in jail for protesting at a nuclear testing site. Ayvazian romanticizes Ani when she should be dramatizing her. Ani goes to the old country to bear witness and even stays on there after the group she travels with returns home. She writes letters that attest to the hardships of the Armenians and to her own sensitivity. She expresses vague desires to “write something” and to “bear witness,” but the only thing we ever see her do is give her coat to a freezing man, after she has received a plane ticket home from her parents.

Ani comes home full of pain from bearing witness--her grandmother helps her, in a comic scene, by teaching her to moan and wring her hands. Even though the play is strewn with Armenian accents, the names of Armenian dishes, projections of Mount Ararat and some lovely folk music played onstage by George Mgrdichian, Armenia itself remains oddly abstract, interchangeable with other places where people endure extreme hardships. Further, Ani’s pain does not seem to distinguish between the terrible things that happened to her family in the Armenian genocide of 1915-1918 and what she is witnessing today. Aside from her anguish, very little happens to Ani herself; the drama is reserved for her ancestors and her country.

As director, Gordon Davidson is efficient--the stage is kept open and is transformed into many locales with just the help of a prop and Paulie Jenkins’ fluid lighting. Davidson treats the characters as if they were deeply written, which could be seen as an act of respect for and faith in the playwright’s work. But his loving approach only accentuates the fact that the play is padded and sentimental. A faster pace might have helped.

As the grandmother, Non, Magda Harout embodies the golden glow of a natural caretaker. She sings the Armenian national anthem in a warm, husky voice reminiscent of the late Georgia Brown. Why her character didn’t love her husband (a late-breaking detail in the drama), we have no idea and just have to take on faith, like so many other things. As the family uncle, Apollo Dukakis provides a quiet, still buffer to all the bustling around him. The play’s core, Tom Mardirosian, Cheryl Giannini Koskoff, Solano and Zak Gavin, make a credible family unit, if unusually sunny and free of internal dissension.

In this play, all the trouble comes from the outside. The family’s recognition of that trouble--their sensitivity to it--is virtually all that constitutes this slim drama.

* “Nine Armenians,” Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Ends Aug. 31. $29-$37. (213) 628-2772. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.

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“Nine Armenians,”

Leslie Ayvazian:Aunt Louise

Apollo Dukakis: Uncle Garo

Zak Gavin: Raffi

Cheryl Giannini: Armine

Magda Harout: Non

Sarah Koskoff: Ani

Tom Mardirosian: John

George Mgrdichian: The Oud Player

Hal Robinson: Papa/Armenian Man

Tiffany Ellen Solano: Ginya

A Mark Taper Forum production. By Leslie Ayvazian. Directed by Gordon Davidson. Sets Ralph Funicello. Costumes Mimi Maxmen. Lights Paulie Jenkins. Sound Jon Gottlieb. Original music George Mgrdichian. Choreography Tom Bozigian, Sheree King. Production stage manager Mary K Klinger.