Connections Lost in the Translation

Making theater is never easy, but try doing it while bombs are dropping outside the lobby entrance.

A veteran of Beirut’s Experimental Theatre and Theatre 67 companies and part of the Armenian community in exile in Lebanon, playwright Vahe Berberian managed to avoid the siege of that city during the Lebanese civil war in the 1980s. But in “The Pink Elephant,” he imagines what it must have been like for some of his colleagues when the theater walls seemed ready to crumble under the onslaught of war.

It seems like the stuff of powerful theater-about-theater, pitting artists against forces beyond their control, forcing actors and directors to consider life’s basics in a way their more comfortable theater brethren in Los Angeles never have to.

But at Theater Unlimited, in an English translation by director Aramazd Stepanian under the aegis of the Armenian Theatre Company, “The Pink Elephant” is as ungainly and lumbering as the animal it symbolically refers to.

Onstage, a company led by director and Armenian patriot Apo (Eric Larkin) is attempting to stage an absurdist play about growing tyranny in an unnamed country. The language tends to be as strained as the situations are abstracted. At one point, out of nowhere, a family endlessly chants: “We are hungry!” At another time, the same family tries to cross into Albania, as repressive a country as existed in the 1980s.

The play suggests a poorly translated mix of “The Inspector General,” “Peer Gynt,” Ionesco and Genet.

What we mostly see at first is the company rehearsing, interrupted by occasional outside explosions, suggested here by a wretched sound system. “The Pink Elephant” is first about the play within the play, which itself is such an awkward piece of agitprop absurdism, a kind of poor man’s “Rhinoceros,” that it seems like a tough sell even if a war weren’t going on.

Act II dwells more on the company itself, but Berberian’s characters are drawn as flatly as possible, so the actual urgencies and bigger ideas ready to boil to the surface never do. A young actor called Vatche (Brent Lee Grossman) is The Innocent, torn among his love of the group, of actress Nina (Claudia Gregorian) and of a possible new life in America.

Veteran thespians Simon (Greg McDonald) and Roupen (Aramazd Stepanian), with Nina, are The Artists, ready to stay the course, while culture bureaucrat Tsolag (Ray Cervantez) is The Philistine, ready to censor at a moment’s notice. The play’s overall intent is to make us connect between the inner play’s themes of absurd tyranny and the outer play’s own mad conditions, but Berberian never makes the connection poetic or compelling. The cast seems much too under-rehearsed to fill in the gaps.

Some watching “The Pink Elephant” may recall news accounts of the brave Sarajevo troupe that produced “Hair” throughout the siege during the Bosnian war. They may also note that sometimes news is more powerful than art.

For the record: In last week’s review of the show “Cole,” the actress who performed in the “Be a Clown” number was misidentified. It was Michele Bernath.

BE THERE

“The Pink Elephant,” Theatre Unlimited, 10943 Camarillo, North Hollywood. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends Jan. 29. $15. (818) 241-3888. Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes.