Meet the Cartozians

Vartan Matiossian 

We went to one of the last performances of Talene Monahon's Meet the Cartozians on December 9, along with a group that included Archbishop Anoushavan, Prelate, and Archpriest Fr. Mesrob Lakissian, Pastor of St. Illuminator's Church. It was a full-house performance, as it has been since the beginning, which also granted an extension until December 14 with a very successful six-week run. Do I need to say that this was an play with an Armenian theme, but with a universal resonance, and that's why we barely saw an Armenian soul in the theater? That's good, for it ensures that it resonated with a wider audience with its discussion of discrimination, racism, immigration, racial classification, privilege, genocide recognition, etc. That's bad too, because Armenians should have flooded the theater over the past six weeks to learn something about their own past in this country and the threat of becoming second-class residents that they endured in 1924-1925, which has a lot of echoes today. 

 

It never felt that the play was two hours long (plus the 20 min. intermission), thanks to the seamless and thrilling performance of the cast, the great mixture of drama and comedy, and wonderful writing with a biting satire in the right places. Even the use of the Armenian language with entire paragraphs, not just with random words--and without killing the language, whether in syntax or the pronunciation--was a delightful and surprising addition to the overall effect. 

 

I was especially interested to see how Talene Monahon had adapted the story of the Cartozian trial (1924-1925) for the stage. She went very deeply into the details with great accuracy. There were just a couple of literary licenses: Tatos Cartozian had two brothers (Aram and Hovsep), not one, who had become citizens without any trouble before him, and two daughters (Hazel and Orie), not one, who testified in the trial. 

 

The one detail that, I think, was not clear to the audience is where the trial was held (district court of Oregon) and what happened afterwards: the federal government was beaten so badly that it called out its appeal to the Taft Supreme Court, as it had done in the Japanese and Indian cases. If the Armenian victory had not been so conclusive (to prove that Armenians were white was requisite sine qua non to be admitted to American citizenship, and this went on from 1790 to 1952), it is not totally improbable that a sleight of hand at the Supreme Court, with the "Four Horsemen" and a former Republican president as chief justice, would have changed history. 

 

This was a great play by all counts, and instructive in many respects. The counterpoint of 1924 in the first part with the debate of 2024 in the second part, after the addition of the Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) category to the census, was probably news for most people in the audience. The genius pairing of the widely unknown Cartozians with the most famous Armenian of the world with a quite similar sounding last name, including the "Waiting for Godot"-kind of situation that develops in the second part, added for a lot of comic relief, but also for a lot of emotional moments.

 

(Full disclosure: I have been researching the Cartozian trial, which is the central subject of the play, for the past fifteen years or so for my book The Color of Choice: The Politics of Race in the United States and Germany (1890-1945) (Brill, 2025). If you are interested, there is an entire 30-page chapter about it.)