~New Monologues for Women by Women ~ (The Strawberry Scene)
Edited by Tori Haring-Smith and Liz Engleman, Published by Heinemann Press
B O O K S
~New Monologues for Women by Women ~ (The Strawberry Scene)
Edited by Tori Haring-Smith and Liz Engleman, Published by Heinemann Press
A R T I C L E S
How Does an Artist Get a Passport?
Adam Szymkowicz: I Interview Playwrights Part 307: Bianca Bagatourian
BLINDSQUIRREL BLOGGINGS
Espy Foundation Residency
No Passport Conference 2007 Text - "Making the Invisible Visible"
Book Review by Bianca Bagatourian- Contemporary Armenian American Drama: An Anthology#JSAS
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BIANCA BAGATOURIAN:
I’d like to begin by making really quick introductions of my panelists and welcoming them all .
DAN ROTHENBERG -
Dan Rothenberg is a director & founding member & co-Artistic Director of Pig Iron Theatre Company, a physical theater ensemble based in Philadelphia. Their Hell Meets Henry Halfway which Dan directed, received an OBIE in 2004. Dan was also awarded a Pew Fellowship in the Arts in 2002.
Simon: In 2005 when I created “What I heard about Iraq” from this very famous article by Eliot Weinberger, which basically traces the trail of lies that got us into a war with Iraq, and then the consequences of that war, I had no idea that I was acting as part of a movement. I just simply created the piece because I wanted to cry out about the illegality and the immorality of this war. I was really angry and very very upset. So, I got my theater company to commit to us presenting the play for just a two week run, just as a way of crying out and saying something about the war. What I have come to learn since September 2005 - and I thought the war would be over by now - that there is this phenomenon going on called “Verbatim Theater”. When we were at the Edinburgh festival this past summer, there were at least over a dozen shows that are now categorized as “Verbatim Theater” or “Fact Based Theater”. This is nothing new, for those of you who are old enough to remember, you know, Are You Now, Have You Ever Been, plays like that. This kind of theater has been around, but there has been a surge of fact based or verbatim theater, certainly in the last year or two, and a lot of it around the Iraq war. It started me thinking a lot of things and one of the main things is that thirty plus years ago, in the early seventies, when I first got involved in theater, as a baby, that one of the first things we did was bury the dead which was a protest against the Vietnam War. Even though that was fictionalized in many ways it was fact-based because it was about dead soldiers coming up and saying what it is that happens and how they feel and all of that. It tried to say something about war and what it does. All of that in this sort of book ending thing, has raised for me the larger question of “What is truth”? And what does that mean, especially in our country. It seems to me, and I’m speaking very personally, that it’s utterly true that the reasons why we are in this war and the result of this war are completely illegal and completely immoral and that enrages me to such an extent that as an artist I feel the need to cry out about it. And yet, as we go on and on and on with this conflict and we are forever faced with this polarization thing that goes on in the news about how we always have to have a republican and a democrat or somebody on the left and somebody on the right as if truth is somehow left and right, or blue and red, and that instead of really dealing with what I consider to be the truth, there seems to be this polarization of the truth. And so, why then are we as artists feeling this need to cry out? Why are we as artists feeling this need to be political? I’m beginning to wonder that this phenomena of this growth of Verbatim Theater is, “Are we the news now?” Have we become the news because we no longer believe in the news?
Bianca: That’s really interesting, do you think that people now expect theater to tell the truth?
Simon: I do. I mean, look, I think that if we factor out a percentage of commercial theater, or commercialization of theater, I think from Aeschylus on, we’ve expected theater artists to cry out about the wrongs at that particular time in society. And so, I think that we are forever making the invisible visible. I think that that’s what we do. I think that we are always trying to tell a kind of truth. At least a truth that is crying out inside us and hopefully is connected to a larger network of truth.
Bianca: Thank you, Simon. I think also besides just stories there’s also words, thoughts, concepts. Elana and I had a conversation about growing up bi-lingual, and how there’s always words that are missing in the English language that you are constantly trying to define. Words that don’t exist in English and vice versa. Do you find that in your work, Elana?
Elana: Yes, the constant awareness that if there’s no word for something it doesn’t exist in a particular culture. You can feel it, but if there is no word for it after the age of four when you become a verbal person, then you begin to think it doesn’t exist.
Bianca: The whole thing doesn’t exist, not just the word. That language encompasses the existence of the act.
Elana: Yes. Absolutely. There’s also, I think, there’s several things that make things seem invisible. They’re not invisible; it’s just that we just can’t see them. They’re there. There can be that there’s no word for it or there can also be a certain cultural mindset and certain educational practices that teach you to think in categories, so you can only define things within categories.
Bianca: So, maybe things aren’t just invisible, but it’s just about different ways of seeing and what you can see, I can’t see and other people can see and it’s about making that visible. It’s about different levels of seeing…and making things visible to different people.
Elana: For me it is. The way I approach it, that’s what it is. It has to do with how a work of art asks you to think and that if it’s asking you to think in a non-automatic way, it’s helping you then to see what falls in between the categories. If as a culture we define things as what they are not, or if we have a categorical way of thinking then certainly in between those places…I think certainly there’s a lot of beauty that we’re missing. In a more journalistic way, there’s a lot of stories and things going on that we’re missing. For me, in a core way actually, beginning to think in a non-categorical way is actually the place that reminds us that we are free. That to me is the core.
Bianca: So it’s these little spaces of non-existence where there’s no limitations or borders because often if things are invisible there’s no limits and you can just go on and on. It’s just endless.
Elana: Yes. You see them as they are, as they come up. I think it reminds us of a kind of an initial freedom. I tend to be really idealistic but I think we are born into that kind of freedom. I mean, I think that is initially where we start.
Bianca: Mac, do you want to talk a little about how you actually invent new words. You make up words.
Mac: I’ll tell you my favorite word of all time which is a word in the Finnish language:“Juoksentilisinkohan” which means “I think I shall wonder about without a definite sense of destination.”
I don’t know, I mean I’ve been giving away copies of this new book by a Princeton professor by the name of Berkhardt. Its called “On Bullshit”. It’s a wonderful little book because he says that we do know what truth is and we do know what lies are but for the bullshitter actually the distinction… bullshitting does not care. He would just as soon say the truth as lie. He’s not even a convicted liar. The only thing to be supported is the self, and the self image of the self. And that’s actually very theatrical. One thing you can say about our society if anything, is it’s overly-theatrical in every single level and that’s why most of the new kinds of theaters that are any good are anti-theatrical. Not necessarily the way Brecht is but someone more like Richard Maxwell is certainly, or Young Jean or everybody. So, I’m not sure I would make a dichotomy between the visible and invisible, that sounds a little Heiddegerian to me and we know about him. But I think that there is more stuff out there than there should be. This huge realm of bullshit which pervades everything in this culture is of great concern and getting rid of that, well...Making that invisible… (laughter) Stamp them out.
Bianca: And what might be a good way of doing that?
Mac: I do think though that theater that attempts to point out what actually happens or has happened is important. Probably more important now that it ever has been.
Bianca: Dan, you were telling me about some very interesting things you guys were working on at Pig Iron. I’d like to hear a little bit about that. It sounds fascinating to me. You’ve created a new acting style based on a Three Brain Theory. Can you tell us a little bit about this?
Dan: Sure. Ummm, Pig Iron is a physical theater company based in Philadelphia. We make all of our work from scratch. Recently we’ve been playing with neuro-science research and trying to imaginatively attach that to acting. I don’t know if folks are familiar with this. I think neuro-scientists don’t actually like to talk about this theory but psychiatrists really do. The three brain theory; you cut down the neo-cortex of the human brain and you find what’s underneath resembles a dog brain and if you keep cutting down you find what resembles a reptile brain…a lizard brain. This guy Paul Maclean posited that each of these brains evolved over time, each of them has their own subjectivity, their own memory, their own sense of space. We’ve been playing around with this. We are an acting style in search of material now. Trying to go back into the lizard brain and I’m sort of speaking in tongues. I’m missing day three in rehearsal right now so I can’t say too much about it. But I was thinking about what some of the other panelist said about this phrase Inattentional blindness.There’s this great neuro-science experiment called Gorillas in our Midst. You ask the subjects to take a look at this video of people playing basket ball and count how many times the team in white scores and in the middle, in the stands behind them, someone comes out in a gorilla suit, bangs on his chest and walks away and you say did you notice anything unusual, anything different in that video and the majority of the people said that the team in the white suit scored a lot and do not see the person in the gorilla suit. I guess I’m interested in what the both of you were saying about this, that certainly the information is out there but…
Mac: That’s the kind of episode I try to use exclusively when writing plays. Gorilla comes in which nobody sees. If I could make a play totally with those things, I’d be the greatest genius of all time.
Dan: My theater company has gone to Poland a few times…(laughter). Alright lets talk about and the gorilla.
Mac: We’re anti-gorillas.
Dan: Once I met this guy who said that he had Tadeusz Kantor’sstudent at an art class. He said in the seventies and eighties they didn’t have any books of paintings, the country was totally closed but because of Kantor’s prominence, he was able to tour. The company was touring all around the world and he would bring back these forbidden books of modernist paintings…smuggle them essentially into the country and have this art seminar in his living room...This illegal art seminar where these Polish students would hungrily devour the catalogues from English editions. That moment has really ceased my imagination. I think all of us, as artists would love to bring that feeling to our audiences. This feeling of, you know, I smuggled this in just for you. You’re not allowed to see it. Nobody else can see it. The audience is feeling hungry, saying “Oh, I know that there are things that have been kept from me and I’m so hungry to find out these things”.
You know the funny thing about communism and meeting the artists from the former soviet block is the bewilderment that they feel now because communism was a good deal for the artist in some ways because everyone had a job. Everybody knew what they could talk about and what they couldn’t talk about which was the terrible political regime that they were living under and now they’re faced with what we’re faced with which is this glut of information and possibility and the mistaken belief that you can choose choose choose everything, and I’ll just pick my channels and my webcast and my little slipper that meets me the ideal consumer. Something that my company is struggling with, and I imagine all of us are, is how to create that feeling of...There’s still things that Inattentional Blindness causes to be invisible, as we are saying, there’s still things that need to be smuggled in, but how to create that feeling of smuggling something in that people are hungry for is quite difficult in an age where we are told that we can have anything we want and consume anything we want.
Bianca: Betty, I wanted to talk to you all little bit about how you actually make the Arab American voice heard in America, both in your monologs and in your work. That’s a really important thing, making voices of different cultures heard that don’t exist. Thinking as an Armenian playwright myself, I know that those voices are rare and hard to find. Can you tell us a little about that.
Betty: Sure. I think images of Arabs, and this is related to what this gentleman was just saying, are not invisible. There are plenty of images of Arabs, they’re just depleted of their humanity. And the consequence of that is what happened with the Iraq war. How it was sold to the American people was the equivalent of saying Bolivia attacked America so we are going to attack Argentina. And there is such a level of ignorance about the Arab world and racism that has been fostered that people buy that and I think culture has an important role to play in making people who are visible have also humanity. They are not just images of screaming people throwing rocks or women who are hooded, or suicide bombers. That’s something that’s really important to me. I’m an artist first and I’m creating things that I hope will last long after all these conflicts have resolved themselves. I think that that’s really important. What’s also important is that in order to talk about being an Arab-American in a way that a primarily American audience will understand...The level of racism...I have to say it’s like this; I have to say it’s like thinking just because people speak the same language, they’re the same culture or have the same history, in order for people to get the fact of how absurd the idea of 9/11 being connected to the Iraq invasion was. And that’s very frustrating. But the other thing I wanted to talk about, because I’m very much trying in this environment to hold on to my connectedness as an artist, is what I think is lacking, aside from the humanity of certain people who it behooves us to dehumanize, and that is emotional truth. If you get people together and sit and have a conversation with somebody, no one will listen to you for two hours. Nobody. Not even your mother. Your shrink, but you have to pay him a lot. And you’re gathering people in an off-Broadway or a decent sized house, a hundred seats, for two hours. That’s two hundred hours of peoples energy and time listening to what you have to say and if you don’t put something out there that’s emotionally true, that’s normally invisible, from your interior gut and what you have to say, you are wasting two hundred hours of people’s time that could be spent eating, fucking, organizing. That’s an enormous responsibility as a playwright. And so I wanted to talk about both those things, emotional truth and also making invisible the humanity of certain people, even though you’re showing images of them.
Bianca: You mentioned responsibility. As playwrights, do you think we have a responsibility of making these unheard stories heard?
Betty:I think…It’s so hard to write a fucking play, excuse me, I’m very sorry, I’m in a kind of a swearing mood…that I don’t think that can’t be the primary reason to write a play, but I think that it plays a huge role in how you’re perceived. I mean, if there were more stories about Arab Americans, this war could not have been sold to the American public as something that’s reasonable. That you can connect one Latin American country to another because there’s so little known. Not that we know so much about Latin America, bit I’m just showing you that level of ignorance about the Arab world. I think if there was even that basic level that we have about Latin America known- but I don’t think it’s my responsibility as a playwright to educate people. I don’t think I have the potential to change people minds about things that they’re fixed about. I mean, if you’re anti-abortion and you see the most pro-choice play, it’s not going to affect you. You have a responsibility to yourself as an artist, but you also have a responsibility to your audience to show them emotional truth and what they do with that, you can’t control.
Bianca: That’s interesting what you said about if there were more stories about Arabs. I’d like to go back to what were talking about a little earlier regarding Simon’s play. That repetition tool. I do think that once something is made visible, you then have to constantly work at it to keep it visible, otherwise it fades away. Once you have a lot of stories that build up this big wave, then it’s harder to overcome. That’s why I agree that it’s important for all these ethnic stories to be heard so much. I want to talk briefly about something that happened a few weeks ago. I’m an Armenian playwright and a few weeks ago I was very saddened to hear that a Turkish-Armenian writer was shot in Turkey for writing about a forbidden story. He wrote about the Armenian Genocide. I think that’s appalling that in this day and age somebody can get shot and killed right in front of their office for their opinions… It’s so awful. Even today, before this session, someone informed me that there are no books in the library system about the Armenian Genocide.. .They all have been removed. Who is doing the removing?
Betty: I think what’s particularly interesting about the story of the Armenian who was shot in Turkey is that he is an Armenian that didn’t move to Armenia. He wanted to stay in Turkey. He wanted to stay and change the society that he was living in. I think that more of that needs to happen as opposed to separation and that’s why it’s so particularly heartbreaking that he was shot.
Bianca: The Armenian community in Turkey is dwindling because it’s so scary. In the last 15 years, 18 journalists have been killed in Turkey. It’s not a fun place to be.
Betty: Which makes it particularly brave to me that he was there.
Bianca: Extremely brave. He was very vocal about the Genocide. He was the editor of a newspaper and he had been receiving death threats for many many months. It’s difficult, as an Armenian playwright, I sit down and the minute I put pen to paper, the first thing that comes to my mind is this huge cultural block that exists within our society. I feel that unless I write about the Genocide, I’m not being a good or loyal Armenian. It is really hard to get past this. Now more and more stories are coming out about this subject from all different angles and circles which is helping to build up this momentum and that is great. But it’s still really hard as a playwright to sit down and say OK, I’m going to skip this huge blind spot in the world today and I’ll just write about on my own thing.
Mac: Do you know the playwright Kelly Stuart?
Bianca: Yes, yes we’ve talked.
Mac: She’s been doing research. She’s learning Turkish. She’s been reading a lot about that stuff. I think that’s an encouraging sign. People who have no connection to the region at all are drawn to it and want to investigate and write their own stories. I’m always curious what people in theater mean by story. What they usually mean is a kind of sentimental melodrama and I think that there are more kinds of stories than just that. I particularly think that some of the topics that are being addressed today demand a different type of storytelling. I don’t know exactly what. But if it’s just a sad story about somebody who is oppressed and killed, it’s easy to trivialize it.
Betty: Well, it’s also easy to shut it off.
Mac: I think we need new ways of telling stories in the theater.
Elana: Doesn’t that also have something to do with this kind of automatic thinking or defining things? Because as long as you keep that way of thinking, everything you hear about goes into those pre-existing boxes.
Mac: Yeah. You know I am haunted by what I call “the pool of the already known.” It’s always one step behind you. All the opinions, all the assumptions just eat you up and make you as stupid as Bush or the Bush democrats that run things. . But I’m always more in interested in what I know that I didn’t know that I know. That’s the only thing that’s interesting. And I think we’re facing a lot of things in this world that demand a new kind of story telling. It is a world replete with bullshit. Eliot Weinberger, somebody mentioned, said we live in a time of the overproduction of virtually everything. And there’s something about a society that just belches an endless succession of identical things or things that look like each other that is deeply and profoundly confusing. Over theatricalized.
Bianca: You mentioned new kinds of story telling. Can you elaborate on that?
Mac: I think you can explore storytelling by looking at how stories first were told. Look at biblical stories. I always like to look at Malory who wrote Le Morte D’Arthur. The way those Arthurian tales are told are completely different than the way than they are told now. And my all time favorite book is the Welsh book of tales from Mabinogionwhich is so crazy but beautiful, and the stories are…well, I don’t have time to tell them but they are just completely strange.
Bianca: Elana, Can you talk a little about your cross-genre work between your poetry and your fiction.
Elana: Well, first of all, just jumping off what Mac said, I don’t know if any of you who want to should rent this movie “Idiocracy” that didn’t get released but it certainly takes what’s going on in this country right now, the categorical thinking, this over-commodification five hundred years from now seriously. It’s really a forceful piece. But anyway, one thought I had was actually about one of Mac’s plays, Whirligig. I was thinking about it because right towards the beginning, this girl is at a bus stop and there’s this voiceover, the bus is leaving and there is all these places the bus is going on it’s way, but these are like places that are very hard to put into any context. They’re just impossible to locate in any kind of automatic way and I think in a sense, I don’t know, but maybe that’s kind of approaching a new way of telling things. Right at the start, what the play is asking you to do is to think in a different way. Just by those lists of places that you cannot locate. There’s no way you can contextualize them, there’s no nationalism, there’s no beaurocracy. They’re just these incredible words that mean something that exist somewhere. I think if you can start out asking the audience to think in that way, you know, the possibilities of different kinds of stories can be communicated. I think it’s very hard to take certain kinds of stories in, I don’t meant to be extreme, but because we’re a little brainwashed. That thing about not seeing…I read that there’s these incredible stories from a long time ago about islands that were far away. A ship would come and they couldn’t see it. It’s the most astounding thing. The shaman could see it. But the rest of the people on the island, they could not see the ship. That’s pretty profound.
Mac: I think the saddest thing about our storytelling both in the theater and elsewhere is that we don’t allow for gaps. For holes. Gaps and swerves and turns. So we think we end up knowing everything and there’s very little room in our heart for the humility of not knowing everything. And that’s why we’re such a grinning, preachy, war-like people. We think we know fucking everything. We know nothing. It’s my favorite Henry James quote, “Nobody knows anything.” Doesn’t sound like Henry James.
Bianca: Mac, could you talk a little bit about just the language of your plays. How you work with language and build new words. I’m always fascinated by that because you’re physically making new things.
Mac: Well, I’m just interested in that stuff. There was a group of playwright yesterday talking and it was about inspiration and I think that creativity and inspiration is one of the most horrible of religious concepts. I wrote a play called Harm’s Way, partly because I think the word harm is one of the most beautiful words in the English language. I wrote it at a time where there is a lot of discussion of violence in American society. I had a problem with this. Because violence I think can be very good. Violence is beautiful in sports and love and nature. But harm is something else. And its actually more precise. So, I don’t know if the play is any good but it enabled me to write it and to be a little bit more precise about what I was trying to do. So, in that sense, yeah.
Bianca: I’m going to read something that I took from The Invention of Tragedy, “An inch to to near the can of can not.” I thought that was lovely.
Mac: That’s a play for a chorus of a thousand and one children. Now, needless to say, I’m having some difficulties. The director and I would go to schools people look at us and say “Oooooh, maybe you should go away now.” I never think you should attempt anything you know how to do.
Bianca: Simon, can you tell us a little about the Fountain Theatre. I’m very interested in how they give voice to a lot of ethnic groups. I know you guys do a lot of Armenian plays which I’m very happy about.
Simon: I just think that theater, especially those of us who have theaters in large cosmopolitan areas that are truly melting pots, that the responsibility of that theater is to give voice to those different communities. We expend a lot of energy, searching for stories. We tend to do a lot of African American themed plays. Obviously Armenian-American. The Fountain Theatre is in an area called Little Armenia so it seems to me that makes sense that we do that. We haven’t been as successful addressing our Latino or Hispanic or Chicano communities. That’s something were working on. We have strong presence with the hard of hearing communities which we have a particular love for. It goes on and on, gay and lesbian etc. etc. But mostly it’s about our hearts. It’s about what we care about. We’re sort of a quadrumvirate; I don’t know what other term to use. We’re four primary voices in the theater and we all have passions about particular things that we care about and we try to give expression to those passions.Bianca: Betty, in what ways do you think the theater community can help the emergence of Arab American voices?
Betty: Have balls and produce them! It’s astounding to me that you can have in the Oscar season, Munich and Syriana, and Goodnight and Good Luck, and the Obies, not even the Tonies, but the Obies are not even honoring that kind of political work. To me that’s astounding. It maybe that theater is so marginal that people are afraid to take risks, but to me, I feel it every time I face a board. It’s difficult to talk about these issues but the people in the theater community need more balls. It was just astounding to me that I just watched the Oscars, knowing what the Obies are honoring. It’s not because the Obies or the Tonies don’t want to honor political work, it’s just that none of the political work is being done, you know, and there are many many up and coming young Arab American artists and artists of other ethnicities that are trying to get their voices out there, but I always say, artistic directors are like deli owners. If you buy a certain type of sandwich, then they’ll make that sandwich. So we need to also generate audiences of people who are interested in other things. But I also think there’s an incredible lack of nerve on the part of many many artistic of directors in this country, and that’s why we trying to play catch-up with Hollywood, which to me is unbelievable.
Bianca: There is also a real lack of grants and scholarships for up and coming writers of ethnic backgrounds.
Betty: No. I think there’s a plethora of grants, but there’s not a plethora of productions.
Bianca: Are there grants specifically for Arab-Americans?
Betty: No, but I think there are more grants than there are opportunities to develop. And the fact of the matter is that most plays are bad. And most plays are done by white men. So, we should mix it up a bit. Even as a women. Like there was some study that fifteen percent new plays were written by women. If you go to medical school or law school, you’re in a class that’s fifty-fifty. if you’re a playwright, you’re fifteen percent of the new plays that are being produced? That’s astounding in this day and age. Get some balls, you know?
Bianca: And on that note, we have about five minutes left. I’d like to open up the floor for some questions.
Audience Question: I’m really interested in strategies for bringing emotional truth and new ways of story telling into theater. What are some strategies that you think are possible if that emotional truth or if that story-telling is not comfortable for the audience or if it’s challenging. In my own experience, I feel that when I bring something that is a little more challenging, the audience is upset. They don’t come back.
Mac: Then you have the wrong audience. See your work has to find the kind of audience it deserves. Just because you’re friends with somebody doesn’t mean they’ll like you work. Particularly when you’re starting out. That is the case. I found myself repeatedly not liking the people who liked my work, and the people I respected, didn’t like my work. So I thought, what’s going on here. And so, I decided to imitate the people whose work I did like. That’s the only way you learn anything anyway. That’s how you learn structures. You want to write a well-made play, imitate one. I do that actually in class once in a while. I go around and say what’s the best play that was ever written.
Simon: I was struck when I heard About Iraq ran at our theater for five months and after every performance we had a talkback and in every single talkback, one of the very first things that people said is, well you need to be doing this for Republicans and for people that are for the war. And then I would pose back to them well, do you think those people would pay twenty-five dollars to come see this play? No one knew how to answer that question. Through that experience, what I came to understand was that theater really is religious. It’s our church. It’s a place where mantras happen. Whatever your faith may be, we go back to time and time again, whether it’s is the torah or the bible or etc. etc., we go back to theater to be re-innervated about something, to be reminded about a kind of basic truth in regards to humanity. So, to me it was important that those people were there. They were there to be reminded of something. They were there to be re-energized about something. That’s where I think emotional truth is, ultimately. So about this issue of preaching to the converted, well who else are preachers preaching to? Aren’t we preachers ultimately? Aren’t we priests? The original playwrights were priests, or some of them were.
Audience Question: I have a question about the brain. One of the things that I’m fascinated with is the idea of the barbaric or the savage versus the civilized. I know the reptilian brain is your oldest portion of your brain so I’m sort of curious in terms of the work that you are doing. How are you breaking down those brain parts?
Dan: Sure. First of all, our company are not neuro-scientists, so we’re giving ourselves the freedom to work imaginatively with these three brains. I guess we’re actually looking at the three brains and looking at the work of Anton Chekhov at the same time. I thought, just to give a quick primer on this, the reptile brain controls the things like reflex, hunger, breathing, sleeping. The dog brain is the seat of emotions and hierarchies and territory, but it has only one emotion at once. The human brain deals with problems and is very given to ambivalence and logic and has the ability to imagine a future. I thought the dog brain was going to be a mystery but actually it’s the human brain that turns out to be the mystery. This thing about emotional truth actually or anything that comes from the dog brain or the lizard brain is what we call a good play, or visceral acting, or something that people care about. We’re looking at these Chekhov plays and all the behaviors that go in there and starting to say that actually these Chekhov plays are about this new dog that comes in and stakes out his territory and everybody else keeps talking about the future and the past, while this new dog is pushing everybody out of the house and establishing himself. I guess, barbaric versus the civilized...I guess this project, like many projects that we’re all doing are just another way of trying to figure out why people do what they do. Is there sense or is there nonsense? Getting in touch with other rhythms of expression-
Bianca: Any last questions?
Audience Question: Mr. Wellman, I’m wondering what you think of my assessment. I teach your Seven Blow Jobs, if you don’t know it you must read it. It’s supposed to be about something pornographic. We never see the photo that is the center of everyone’s attention. I think it’s a wonderful piece. You’re making the invisible visible in our minds. What do you say to that?
Mac: I don’t know what to say.
Audience Question: Did you think that we’re all going to come up with a different reaction to what is on the photo?
Mac: Yeah. Well, that happened during the Mapplethorpe brouhaha and I waited like six months for one of the better class of playwrights to write what seemed to be the most obvious play to write. No one did it so I had to do it. But it’s also written in basic English, like a sixth grade book. It’s like a primer for how to use something as a pretext for censorship, which is so easy to do. I’m actually amazed I’m not rich and famous because of this play, but there’s no justice in the world.
Audience: There are no blow jobs!
Bianca: OK. I think we have come to an end now. I want to thank everybody for coming and to thank all my panelists.
-JSAS- Book Review by Bianca Bagatourian-
Contemporary Armenian American Drama: An Anthology
Edited by Nishan Parlakian
Published by Columbia University Press, 2004
As a Diasporan Armenian playwright, I often wonder what priorities or instincts to follow. Must I tell the history of the Armenians? Should I write an Armenian play? Must it be a genocide play? What subject matter ought I spend the next six months to a year chiseling, molding and perfecting into shape? These questions, not matter how glib, recur without fail in the thoughts and emotions of a Diasporan playwright as he or she prepares to strike the keyboard every day, or, as one would say in bygone times, before pen hits paper, specific and purposeful choices must be made. Therefore, when I first discovered “Contemporary Armenian American Drama: An Anthology,” edited by Dr. Nishan Parlakian, published by Columbia University Press, 2004, I was elated. Dr. Nishan Parlakian, emeritus professor of drama at John Jay College, is himself a playwright and a director who has staged plays in Armenian and in English for many years. That someone had assembled in one place, a collection of plays about and by Armenians in the twentieth century was a great panoramic source of insight and inspiration to me and it was with that precise feeling that I embarked upon my journey of this book.
The chronological progression of the plays appropriately begins with “Ellis Island”, a fitting place to start our adventure even if the gates of this grand doorway are slammed shut on our protagonists, Anna, the old lady, and Peter, a professor from Lebanon. In this play by Raffi Arzoomanian, we intimately feel the importance of the rights of entry and also sense the importance of language in myriad ways, for it is the lack of the English language, which in the end, keeps Anna out of America. This is a play with a universality about the immigrant experience, both symbolically and metaphorically, which captures the fear of the unknown and the many twists of fate. I can only imagine how much more palpable these must have been when the play was actually performed within the main building at Ellis Island.
Our second stop is the more establishing piece called “The Armenians” by our greatest and most famous (Pulitzer prize rejecting) Armenian dramatist, William Saroyan. “The Armenians” is, as the title suggests, very Armenian. In fact, it is the most Armenian of the plays I have read by Saroyan. It is 1921 in Fresno and Armenians are discussing the plight of their old country and how they could possibly be of help. What better demonstration of the timelessness of a good story, when eighty-five years later, though circumstances are different, we are all still pondering the same question. And, not only does this world class author capture a piece of history marvelously, but I find myself wondering how much of his own story is told through the voices of such characters as Reverend Knadjian when he remarks “I find that I am most myself there, I am most real there, I am most deeply Armenian when I am in my study.” Is this Saroyan the man speaking himself and is this how we meet the man through his works?
Next, comes “Grandma Pray For Me,” a play by the editor of this volume himself, Dr. Nishan Parlakian. Though themes and ideas like this have been explored by many an Armenian writer, to do so through the medium of drama is a different thing altogether. I was extremely touched by the vision of the Grandma with her prayer beads sitting in the window symbolizing all our Armenian grandmothers together, praying as a last resort, helpless in the new country, waiting. This story moves along at a perfect pace and the quality of the writing is very poetic, as is that of the next play we come to.
Who can ever forget, even after one reading, the poignant words of the opening monologue of Barbara Bejoian’s “Dance, Mama, Dance.” “There is a concentration camp of the mind, in which women have been forced to dwell...” In one poetic phrase, she captures a predicament, which has haunted women for centuries. In this sophisticated piece, Bejoian depicts Armenian life in Watertown, MA, which, for an Armenian from a far away land, may come as a complete surprise.
In “Nine Armenians,” a well known play by Leslie Ayvazian, we see another illustration of the idea that no matter how completely different our Armenian experiences are or in which country we exercise them, they are still, in fact, Armenian. Here we see three generations of Armenian women with their feelings of chaos, of togetherness, with the shouting, the affection, the bonding, all captured so well in a mere sixteen short scenes. The play is as much a joy to read as it is to see performed.
Our next stop brings us to “Mirrors,” by Herand Markarian, where the results of trauma are shown through the extremes to which it hurls us and our human psyche. The subject of the Armenian Genocide is more directly approached here and exorcised via haunting memories that live on decades after the nightmare is over.
In the courtroom setting of “The Armenian Question,” by William Rolleri and Anna Antaramian, a Turkish general constantly attempts to derail the court on the question of the Armenian Genocide. This play, more than the others in this volume, deals directly with the question of the Genocide and the outrage it should cause among civilized nations and concludes with yet more unanswered questions.
The volume ends with the commanding “A Girl's War,” by Joyce Van Dyke which takes us from present day America all the way to the Karabagh conflict and entangles it all with the personal conflicts of the protagonists. This play is the most contemporary, attempting to unite our lives in one country with the struggles and realities of another to which we are so deeply attached.
The prevalent theme in these plays seems to be that of the Armenian Genocide, though other topics such as assimilation and the plight of women do enter the dialogue, there is no getting away from that huge cultural wound which, if you will, dominates the minds and expressions of all Armenians even today. Plays are meant to be seen, not necessarily read, but within a small ethnic group, where there is little opportunity for costly presentations, it becomes important to once again read plays to hear the voice of the people. For me, as a working playwright, to see what has already been done, clarifies what still needs to be done. Like a barometer, if you will, this book takes the pulse of contemporary Armenian drama.
And so, loud and clear, I heard the ancestral voices as Dr. Parlakian likes to call them, voices which, sooner or later, every person begins to hear. There are excellent notes provided before each play that orientate and help to trace the author and put into context what you are about to read. I welcome such a rich offering of Armenian contemporary drama and I applaud Dr. Parlakian for bringing this project to fruition as a worthy addition to the previous volume, Modern Armenian Drama, edited along with Peter S. Cowe. Together, these two tomes create a tremendously enriching and invaluable experience for a modern day Armenian playwright.
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