Baring witness

Nine Armenians tell their story at Trinity Rep

by Carolyn Clay

NINE ARMENIANS. By Leslie Ayvazian. Directed by Oskar Eustis. Set design by Michael McGarty. Costumes by William Lane. Lighting by D.M. Wood. Sound by Peter Sasha Hurowitz. Choreography by Kelli Wicke Davis. Dramaturgy by Janice Dzovinar Okoomian. With Fred Sullivan Jr., Phyllis Kay, Timothy Crowe, Barbara Orson, Ginger Karian Allister, Teddy Karian Allister, Janice Duclos, Robert J. Colonna, and Elizabeth Eidenberg. At Trinity Repertory Company, through November 8.

The act of witnessing is important, and as such Nine Armenians is important. A fragmented family comedy, it has at its core the century's first genocide: the slaughter during World War I of more than a million Armenians by the Turks. Another million Armenians fled their country -- many, including playwright Leslie Ayvazian's grandparents, to America. The sheer numbers give the play's seemingly straightforward title poignance: with so many gone, it counts to count the survivors.

Yet the Armenian holocaust remains one of the century's greatly under-reported tragedies. The Turks have never acknowledged responsibility, and it is said that Hitler, contemplating a genocide of his own, remarked, "Who remembers the Armenians nowadays?" Indeed, one of the themes of the play is the way in which bearing witness skips a generation: the actual witnesses -- in this case, the characters based on Ayvazian's grandparents -- steep their children in the culture but shelter them from the horror. This leaves the grandchildren -- here, playwright Ayvazian's generation -- to brave a look. In Nine Armenians, the central character is a politically concerned young woman who, spurred by her grandfather's death, travels to modern-day Armenia (no bed of roses, Turks or no Turks) to let a legacy of suffering seep into her too-comfortable American bones.

But I believe I mentioned that Nine Armenians is a comedy, and something of a goofy, semi-absurdist one at that. Ayvazian roots her gags -- in particular, the repeated ritual of extended family leavetaking, complete with football-huddle embrace and the fielding of enormous aluminum trays of home-cooked food -- in her theme. Comic or tragic, the reluctance to separate from loved ones is a symptom of any Diaspora. Similarly, the idea of home -- whether it's the dream of a cozier Armenia or the cozy American dream house -- becomes almost a totem, as the presence on the Trinity stage of a warmly glowing dollhouse model of the looming suburban façade behind points up.

The Trinity production marks the New England premiere (except for a benefit reading with Olympia Dukakis) of Nine Armenians, which had its debut in 1995 at Seattle's Intiman Theatre. Ayvazian has, I believe, tinkered with the play, which nonetheless remains dramatically sketchy. It's family snapshots -- of a minister grandfather puzzled by the failure of American schools to teach the genocide; of a middle-aged brother and sister at odds; of a disoriented uncle who prefers wandering to his wife's boisterous presence -- rather than a family story. Moreover, the pictures are not ordered to maximum effect.

At the center of this ethnic-assimilationist comedy -- in which Armenian-American teens roller-blade across the stage as their elders slosh pots of tahss kehbob among themselves -- is the story of young adult Ani's coming to grips with her history. Following the death of her grandfather, and to the consternation of her frightened parents, she travels to Yerevan, where she is both inspired by the culture and dwarfed by her inability to communicate or to ameliorate the harshness of conditions that include inadequate food, shelter, and infrastructure.

Ani can only witness -- and vow to break the silence. "WE ARE YELLERS," she affirms when the clan, seeing her off at the airport, get into a loud argument over a piece of family lore that (hilariously) involves a relative's being knighted for the invention of beef jerky. Ani wants to "yell things in newspapers." Oddly, upon returning home, she finds herself alienated and mute -- until the play's most audacious scene, in which her Armenian-émigrée grandmother teaches her, almost by rote, the ancient female antidote to suffering. Together the two women wring their hands -- rub and squeeze, rub and squeeze -- and groan. This should be the end of the play, whatever rearrangement it takes.

A company of Trinity regulars, under the direction of artistic director Oskar Eustis, manage to balance Nine Armenians' warmth with its wackiness. Timothy Crowe, in particular, marries the minister grandfather's dignity to his befuddlement. And newcomer Elizabeth Eidenberg, reprising the role she played at the Mark Taper Forum and the Denver Center Theatre, is a gutsy, radiant Ani, trying to fit into her history the way she fits into her jeans.

That said, this seems as good a time as any to register my disagreement with Eustis's apparent commitment to enfolding the community not just into the Trinity process but into the Trinity product -- we've had enthroned married couples in A Midsummer Night's Dream, high-school marching bands in The Music Man, and now an Armenian-community chorus cast as the citizens of a mountain village near Yerevan, who entertain Ani in memory of her grandfather. I'm no Scrooge when it comes to amateur performance (though the contribution of the chorus can't compare with that of the beautiful recorded music used elsewhere in the production), but the juxtaposition of professionals and nonprofessionals in the play is jarring. Even in Nine Armenians, it should be less important to be Armenian than to be an actor.