Newark Star Ledger, NJ
Jan 28 2005

Grandma’s basement full of secrets

BY PETER FILICHIA
Star-Ledger Staff

Leslie Ayvazian had a feeling that when she went into the
sub-basement of her grandmother’s house in Leonia, she was going to
find something special.

She did indeed: the diaries kept by her maternal grandmother, Marie
Bedikian. They’re the basis of “Rosemary and I,” Ayvazian’s new play,
which begins a three-week run at the Passage Theatre Company in
Trenton on Thursday.

In 1989, after Bedikian’s death, Ayvazian inherited the Bergen County
home and moved in with her husband, Sam Anderson, and son, Ivan. She
then began exploring, somehow expecting to find a hidden treasure or
two.

There were many more. “Drawers and drawers full of diaries,” says
Ayvazian, still sounding astonished at the discovery. “Very little
was in English, and much was in her native Armenian — and in three
other languages, too. I had no idea that she knew five different
languages.”

Ayvazian had Bedikian’s diaries translated — and found more
surprising information.

“She had never told me that she once had a singing career,” Ayvazian
says. “She actively sang for 10 years — in seven different languages
— and even appeared at Carnegie Hall.”

The diaries yielded some tragic stories, too. In 1915, Ayvazian’s
grandparents were living in the Armenian section of Istanbul, where
Bedikian was studying with noted Armenian composer Solomon
Solomonian, better known by his pseudonym, Komitas.

“She was on her way to a lesson,” says Ayvazian, “when a neighbor
leaned out the window and told her to go home because Komitas had
been arrested, and the Armenian massacre by the Turks had begun.”

Komitas was among some 500 Armenians shot by the Turks, yet he
survived the bullet wounds. He went mad from the experience and died
20 years later in a Paris asylum.

“I learned,” says Ayvazian, “that he never spoke another word as long
as he lived.”

Within weeks of the massacre, Ayvazian’s grandparents were on their
way to New York. “They took linens, tablecloths, rugs and trunks full
of other things,” she says, “and yet they kept them in this
sub-basement and never opened them. I found my grandmother’s
costumes, too, made of the most gossamer material.”

Ayvazian started writing. Some of the stories wound up in her play,
“Nine Armenians,” which was produced off-Broadway by the Manhattan
Theatre Club in 1996. Yet the idea of a writer who’s having a
difficult time learning about her family’s hushed-up history turned
into what is now “Rosemary and I.”

“I’d been working on it, on and off, for all these years. For a long
while, it didn’t have a title. I have a problem with titles,”
Ayvazian admits. “My son was 4 days old before we decided on a name
for him. Then, after Rosemary Harris played my grandmother in a
reading — and did it so well — I renamed the character after her.”

Now Passage theatergoers will see the results under the direction of
Blair Brown — the same Blair Brown who won a Tony Award in 2000 for
her performance in “Copenhagen” on Broadway and starred in the 1987
TV series “The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd.”

Their collaboration was engineered by Lisa Loosemore, who’s
Ayvazian’s manager and Brown’s agent. “Lisa read my play ‘Lovely
Day,’ about a Vietnam vet who believes his son should fight in the
current war, while the boy’s mother does not,” says Ayvazian. “She
gave it to Blair, who liked it, and when we met and I told her I
belonged to a writing group, she asked if she could come one night.”

Ayvazian gave everyone writing assignments that night. “No matter
what I asked,” she says, “everything Blair wrote concerned how much
she wanted to be a director. One thing led to another, and now she’s
directing ‘Rosemary and I.’ She even designed the poster, too.”

And she cast Ayvazian as Rosemary’s daughter, Julia — a character
based on Ayvazian’s mother.

“I usually like to sit back and see my plays performed, but when I
did a reading (Passage artistic director) June Ballinger thought I
should do it, and Blair agreed,” says Ayvazian, who’s now commuting
from that Leonia home to Trenton. “But I promise I won’t do the next
production.”