Aram Kouyoumdjian
“Finally!”
Of all the compliments that audience members kindly shared with me
after seeing my latest play, “Happy Armenians,” this single but
altogether-loaded word somehow penetrated deeper and resonated with me
longer. The speaker, a longtime friend of mine, practically sighed it,
as if the utterance were allowing him a cathartic release – an escape
from some crushing weight. I understood the emotion behind the sentiment
because the play I’d written was about Armenian history, but it wasn’t a
story of suffering or lamentation. It was an unapologetic –
revisionist, really – reimagining of that history as one of victory and
domination.
“Happy Armenians” unfolds in an alternate version of history in which
the Kingdom of Cilicia did not meet its end in 1375 but beat back
Mamluk and Central Asian invaders to emerge as a sprawling empire. At
the play’s open, the empire has endured for 640 years and counting.
Ruling over colonies as far away as Scandinavia, it is powerful and
prone to conquest and oppression. It does what empires do.
A Response to Genocide
I wrote “Happy Armenians” because I wanted to create a work of theater
that responded to the Genocide during this year of its centennial
without being a “Genocide play.” The fantastical premise of “Happy
Armenians,” which contemplates what might have been if Armenians had
eluded nearly a millennium of persecution, was intended to be that
response – deeply personal and poignant, yet assertive and leavened with
humor.
Even as I raced to finish the script, however, an opportunity came up
for me to stage an outdoor theatrical performance in conjunction with
the groundbreaking iWitness installation at the Music Center Plaza and
Grand Park downtown. The installation featured outsized portraits of
Genocide survivors, taken by my photographer friends Ara Oshagan and
Levon Parian, and displayed on jagged three-dimensional,
larger-than-life metallic frames; architect Narineh Mirzaeian had come
up with the concept and fellow architect Vahagn Thomasian brought it to
life. (For their innovative spirit, Oshagan, Parian, and Thomasian were
named Leading Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine earlier this
month.)
The open-air, site-specific performance piece I ended up designing
was entitled “i Go On,” playing on a line from a Samuel Beckett novel.
Using testimonials from 14 survivors, it invited audience members to
join a procession of 10 performers along 14 “stations.” (Each performer
told an individual survivor’s story, followed by a cacophonous choral
recitation meant to give voice to the survivors whose stories could not
be separately told.) The procession sought to evoke deportation marches
and protest marches, as well as the Stations of the Cross; religious
symbolism ran through the piece not just because Armenia was the first
Christian nation but because the Armenian Church had canonized the
victims of the Genocide earlier this year. A fountain sequence in the
middle of the procession, featuring 10 additional performers submerging
themselves into water, symbolically referenced the Euphrates river,
which became an unmarked grave for countless Armenian bodies.
“i Go On” allowed me to engage with the Genocide narrative head-on in
a way that an ordinary play in a traditional theater space could not.
Themes on the scale of genocide do not readily lend themselves to
theatrical presentation because their magnitude is too great, too
overwhelming, for an enclosed and confined stage. But in a park with
over a dozen playing areas – set amidst towering survivor photos – the
performance piece could achieve a dimension appropriate for its content.
Imagining No Genocide
Less than six months later, I was staging the opposite play – one that
envisioned a track of history in which the Genocide never occurred.
“Happy Armenians” had been in me for several years; I have drafts of
scenes dating back to 2010. Whenever I would tell anyone about the
premise, the typical response I received was, “What a great concept!”
However, a concept alone does not a play make. For starters, there was
the minor issue of an actual plot. What was to be story? What sort of
characters were going to populate the stage, and what exactly were they
going to do or experience? When would their story be taking place? And
where: in a corporate high-rise? a rural village? a hospital?
Eventually, I settled on a palace. The story would be about royalty –
specifically, the ruler of the Armenian Empire, who is facing imminent
death and grooming his successor, a most unlikely (and unwilling) heir
to the throne.
Then there was the question of tone. The play started out as a farce
and subsequently turned too serious, until I finally decided that it
would have to be a dramedy. We worked hard to achieve a delicate balance
between drama that was not too heavy and comedy that was not too silly.
We aimed for poignancy, while consciously resisting anger or darkness.
By “we,” I don’t just mean myself and the cast – although the quintet of
Daniel Hubbard, Heather Lynn Smith, Tavis L. Baker, Jade Hykush, and
Gregory DePetro navigated that fine line with remarkable skill. The
design elements were just as integral to the endeavor – from the rich
but deep colors of Maro Parian’s set and Henrik Mansourian’s lighting,
to the buoyant but moving strains of Ara Dabandjian’s original music
compositions.
A New Paradigm
Ultimately, we tried to make “Happy Armenians” uplifting, and audiences
assured us that uplift was what they felt most. This still pleases me to
no end, since I am hopeful that the play will help usher in a new,
wide-reaching, and forward-thinking post-centennial paradigm in Armenian
drama that moves beyond mourning for the past but instead contemplates a
future from a position of strength and optimism.
At a panel entitled “What’s Next?” shortly after April 24, I argued
that a new paradigm is imperative, given the landscape change our
Diaspora has undergone. With the near-dismantling of our Middle Eastern
communities, the Diaspora has decidedly shifted West, where Armenians
have attained levels of education, wealth, and political influence that
are virtually unprecedented in modern times. Accordingly, our
communities and arts organizations must abandon outmoded systems of
governance and operations, and engage in cultural productivity that is
both progressive and aggressive. Our notions of victimhood must give way
to a redefined identity that does more than remember and commemorate,
but rather prioritizes an ambitious agenda for the coming age – an
agenda that includes the committed pursuit of Genocide reparations and
the challenging business of nation-building in the independent republic –
and tackles it with a renewed sense of confidence.
The work awaits artists and audiences alike, for the next centennial has already begun.
"Asbarez," December 31, 2015
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