Armenian Couple Find Healing After the Killings

THEATER REVIEW | ‘BEAST ON THE MOON’

The New York Times
April 28, 2005

By CHARLES ISHERWOOD

all it meeting cute, the old-school way. Aram Tomasian, a new American
living in Milwaukee in 1921, orders his bride from the old-country
catalog after taking a shine to her photograph. The girl arrives, but
hold on: she doesn’t quite match the picture. Sure enough, they
shipped the wrong merchandise.

Love will ultimately prevail in “Beast on the Moon,” the sincere but
musty romantic drama by Richard Kalinoski that opened last night at
the Century Center for the Performing Arts. But the path to marital
contentment runs through some rough emotional terrain, even after Aram
has made his peace with the bait-and-switch trick.

Both Aram (Omar Metwally) and his 15-year-old wife, Seta (Lena
Georgas), are Armenians, survivors of the killings and mass
deportations that took place in the Ottoman Empire while World War I
raged in Europe. They bear scars that must be healed, or at least
acknowledged, before true union can be achieved. Indeed, it’s the
unhappy confluence of Aram’s psychic wounds and Seta’s physical trauma
that causes the conflict at the heart of the play.

Minutes after Seta has set down her worn tapestry bag and taken an
awed, grateful look around her strange new habitat, Aram tries to drag
her off to the bedroom. He is on a desperate mission to replace the
family he lost in the killings, and wants to begin procreating,
pronto. Sadly, Seta’s years of malnourishment make this difficult, and
as Aram’s frustration grows, he expends his anger on his increasingly
despondent and isolated bride.

“Beast on the Moon” was produced at the Humana Festival at the Actors
Theater of Louisville in 1995, and has racked up a lot of
frequent-flier miles in the ensuing years. Its prize-winning career on
international stages includes productions in 17 countries and 12
languages, according to the show’s publicist. In 2001, the play won
five Molière awards. (That’s French for Tony.)

The reasons for its popularity are not hard to discern. The play is
forthright in performing tasks that clearly have wide international
applications: consciousness-raising and the promotion of tear-duct
health.

A narrator, played by the nicely avuncular Louis Zorich, is on hand to
provide history lessons about the plight of the Armenians that do not
fit neatly into the framework of the play. And with the help of a
third character, a surrogate son named Vincent (Matthew Borish), a few
life lessons will be learned, too, when the cowed Seta and the stern
Aram clash at last in the cathartic confrontation that provides the
play with its emotional climax.

The production at the Century Center, the play’s New York premiere, is
respectable and effectively acted. A little too effectively,
actually. It’s easy enough to guess the secondary career of the
production’s director, Larry Moss. Only a dedicated acting coach could
elicit performances this relentless.

Mr. Metwally, seen on Broadway in last season’s short-lived “Sixteen
Wounded,” brings a dark intensity to the domineering Aram, and
Ms. Georgas’s bright, timorous smile can be affecting. But one of
Mr. Moss’s mottoes, at least on the evidence of this production, seems
to be that to stop moving is to stop acting. Both performances are
exhaustingly busy, plastered in surface filigree that is more
distracting than illuminating.

The virus also infects the work of young Mr. Borish, a precociously
professional 13-year-old. His performance as the prickly but
good-hearted young tough is so polished and persuasive that it seems
churlish to note that it is also mechanical. He, too, seems to have
matriculated at the Energizer Bunny Academy of Dramatic Arts.

Beast on the Moon

By Richard Kalinoski; directed by Larry Moss; sets by Neil Patel;
costumes by Anita Yavich; lighting by David Lander; sound by Peter
Fitzgerald; production stage manager, Fredric H. Orner; production
management, Showman Fabricators Inc.; fight consultant, Rick Sordelet;
general manager, Roy Gabay; associate producers, Stephanie Bast,
Anahid Shahrik and Linda Shirvanian.

Presented by David Grillo and Matt Salinger.

At Century Center for the Performing Arts, 115 East 15th Street,
Manhattan; (212) 239-6200. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes.

WITH: Louis Zorich (Gentleman), Omar Metwally (Aram), Lena Georgas
(Seta) and Matthew Borish (Vincent).