Sacramento Bee
April 11, 2005, Monday METRO FINAL EDITION

Actors plumb emotions in plays about genocide

by Marcus Crowder Bee Theater Critic

The Armenian genocide of 1915 has left lasting scars affecting
generations of people, much like slavery in here in America, the
Jewish Holocaust in Europe, mass killings in Cambodia and the
inter-tribal massacres in Rwanda. Physical brutality and atrocities
eventually yield to sustained emotional trauma for survivors and
descendents of survivors.

Writer and director Aram Kouyoumdjian has created two short and
affecting one-person plays dealing with the Armenian genocide by the
Turkish government, and they opened Friday at California Stage.

The curtain-raiser, “Protest,” performed by J.D. Rudometkin, tells of
a young protester’s hallucinatory out-of-body experience while being
jailed for blocking the entrance to the Turkish Embassy in Los
Angeles. The second, longer piece, “The Delicate Lines,” performed by
Jan Ahders, is a dour memoir of a childhood lost and adulthood
shadowed by the genocide.

Rudometkin is a quiet, often muted actor who gives one of his more
expansive and satisfying performances in “Protest,” which the author
originally performed himself three years ago. Kouyoumdjian moves
Rudometkin around the intimate California Stage space, producing an
accessible energy that activates the play’s symbolic dreamscape.

As Rudometkin’s character is hauled away from a nonviolent protest of
Turkish denials of the genocide, he envisions himself in the Syrian
desert. The Armenians were marched into that desert when driven out
of Turkey, and it’s the place where so many died. Kouyoumdjian gets
an effective poetic irony in the situation and a convincing
performance from Rudometkin.

In “The Delicate Lines,” Jan Ahders relates an epic that follows her
character over 35 years from Armenia to France and the United States
in recounting the effects of the genocide.

The woman, Isabel, is taken as a child to a French orphanage, and her
brother Vahe and their best friend, Garo, are sent to another one
nearby. Though they escape Turkey with their lives, the emotional
devastation leaves them broken and unable to really connect with one
another.

Ahders is a remarkable, nearly hypnotic performer at times, and she
carries her character’s burden gracefully here. The dialogue is often
arch, formal and weighted, but Ahders gives an emotional authenticity
to a story that feels somewhat removed.

The Delicate Lines and protest

* * * 1/2

WHEN: Continues at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday (last
show)

WHERE: California Stage, 1723 25th St.

TIME: 65 minutes with no intermission