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THEATER REVIEW: GOLDEN THREAD PREMIERES NIGHT OVER ERZINGA
By Ken Bullock
Berkeley Daily Planet
Sept 21 2011
CA
Golden Thread Productions is one of the important Bay Area theater
companies that has a very specific mission--to explore the culture
and identity, or identities, of Middle Easterners and Middle Eastern
Americans. For the past decade and a half, since Torange Yeghiazarian
founded the troupe, Golden Thread's brought plays from and about the
Middle East in all its diversity to stages throughout the Bay Area,
including its annual ReOrient festival of short plays, as well as
storytelling shows to schoolchildren.
Night Over Erzinga, the premiere of a new play at the South Side
Theatre (Magic Theatre, Fort Mason) in San Francisco by Adriana Sevahn
Nichols about refugees from the Armenian genocide coming to America
and what they and their descendants face, by both remembering and
forgetting the past, is the first event in a collaborative National
New Plays Initiative between Golden Thread, Silk Road Theatre Project
(Chicago) and the Lark Play Development Center (New York), Middle
East America.
An excellent cast--Natalie Ammanian, Neva Marie Hutchinson, Terry Lamb,
Sarita Ocon, Lawrence Radecker, Juliet Tanner and Brian Trybom--with
the unusually clarity of Hafiz Karmali's direction has brought life to
a mixed perspective of immigrants trying to escape the past, to find
themselves ... assisted by Penka Kouneva's unusual original music,
by designers Mikiko Uesugi (scenery), Jim Cave (lighting), Michelle
Mulholland (costumes) and Mitchell Greenhill (sound).
This is in many ways an exemplary production, bringing out the best
in an ambitious, sometimes problematic script. The first part deals
with refugees trying to bury the past in an effort to create a future
for themselves, a dream on the terms of the society they've fled to,
and the emotional price, the cultural emptiness their self-repression
begets. The second part follows--at first in a way almost like a
satiric burlesque of the first part--the American-born daughter
of the Armenian couple who met in Massachusetts in the first part,
who's fled the last vestige of her family and cultural identity to
perform as a dancer, marrying a Latino, another refugee coming from
a more traditional, family-oriented culture. The action is never
quite chronological, following instead the logic of dreams, memory,
simple association from time to time.
There's deft role-switching by all the actors, Trybom and Tanner in
particular, to portray three generations and more of uprootedness
and striving for a new life, a new identity. The story touches on
hardship and the atrocities of the past mainly through stories that
finally get told and the evidence of emotional and mental turmoil,
from unexamined habits that determine a life and its attitudes to
the delusions of mental collapse.
The play ends with a dreamlike scene around a wishing tree--a good
alternate title!--its branches tied with cloths signifying wishes. On
opening night, Yeghiazarian unveiled a commissioned Tree Of Life,
to honor ancestors and future generations, by Bay Area artist Thomas
Sepe that will remain in the lobby through the run of the show,
to which audiences may tie their wishes.
The production is one of the most lucid I've seen recently on a Bay
Area stage. Karmali--himself a muslim of the Aga Khan's sect--and his
players of various backgrounds illuminate the refugees' experience,
show their inner lives and point to both the difference of cultural
origins and the improvisatory experiment of American assimilation,
revealing good and bad in the roots and in the results ... A triumph
of live theater in bringing out inner strengths and transforming
occasional awkwardnesses in the play, creating unforgettable
dramatic--and, yes, comic--images of immigrant heritage, of our
common heritage.
http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2011-09-21/article/38427?headline=Theater-Review-Golden-Thread-Premieres-Night-Over-Erzinga
From: A. Papazian
By Ken Bullock
Berkeley Daily Planet
Sept 21 2011
CA
Golden Thread Productions is one of the important Bay Area theater
companies that has a very specific mission--to explore the culture
and identity, or identities, of Middle Easterners and Middle Eastern
Americans. For the past decade and a half, since Torange Yeghiazarian
founded the troupe, Golden Thread's brought plays from and about the
Middle East in all its diversity to stages throughout the Bay Area,
including its annual ReOrient festival of short plays, as well as
storytelling shows to schoolchildren.
Night Over Erzinga, the premiere of a new play at the South Side
Theatre (Magic Theatre, Fort Mason) in San Francisco by Adriana Sevahn
Nichols about refugees from the Armenian genocide coming to America
and what they and their descendants face, by both remembering and
forgetting the past, is the first event in a collaborative National
New Plays Initiative between Golden Thread, Silk Road Theatre Project
(Chicago) and the Lark Play Development Center (New York), Middle
East America.
An excellent cast--Natalie Ammanian, Neva Marie Hutchinson, Terry Lamb,
Sarita Ocon, Lawrence Radecker, Juliet Tanner and Brian Trybom--with
the unusually clarity of Hafiz Karmali's direction has brought life to
a mixed perspective of immigrants trying to escape the past, to find
themselves ... assisted by Penka Kouneva's unusual original music,
by designers Mikiko Uesugi (scenery), Jim Cave (lighting), Michelle
Mulholland (costumes) and Mitchell Greenhill (sound).
This is in many ways an exemplary production, bringing out the best
in an ambitious, sometimes problematic script. The first part deals
with refugees trying to bury the past in an effort to create a future
for themselves, a dream on the terms of the society they've fled to,
and the emotional price, the cultural emptiness their self-repression
begets. The second part follows--at first in a way almost like a
satiric burlesque of the first part--the American-born daughter
of the Armenian couple who met in Massachusetts in the first part,
who's fled the last vestige of her family and cultural identity to
perform as a dancer, marrying a Latino, another refugee coming from
a more traditional, family-oriented culture. The action is never
quite chronological, following instead the logic of dreams, memory,
simple association from time to time.
There's deft role-switching by all the actors, Trybom and Tanner in
particular, to portray three generations and more of uprootedness
and striving for a new life, a new identity. The story touches on
hardship and the atrocities of the past mainly through stories that
finally get told and the evidence of emotional and mental turmoil,
from unexamined habits that determine a life and its attitudes to
the delusions of mental collapse.
The play ends with a dreamlike scene around a wishing tree--a good
alternate title!--its branches tied with cloths signifying wishes. On
opening night, Yeghiazarian unveiled a commissioned Tree Of Life,
to honor ancestors and future generations, by Bay Area artist Thomas
Sepe that will remain in the lobby through the run of the show,
to which audiences may tie their wishes.
The production is one of the most lucid I've seen recently on a Bay
Area stage. Karmali--himself a muslim of the Aga Khan's sect--and his
players of various backgrounds illuminate the refugees' experience,
show their inner lives and point to both the difference of cultural
origins and the improvisatory experiment of American assimilation,
revealing good and bad in the roots and in the results ... A triumph
of live theater in bringing out inner strengths and transforming
occasional awkwardnesses in the play, creating unforgettable
dramatic--and, yes, comic--images of immigrant heritage, of our
common heritage.
http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2011-09-21/article/38427?headline=Theater-Review-Golden-Thread-Premieres-Night-Over-Erzinga
From: A. Papazian