SEX, GOD AND LITTLE ARMENIANS
By Steven Leigh Morris
LA Weekly, CA
Aug. 23, 2006
Is that a gun in your hand, or are you just pleased to see me? Tetlow
and Simonini in Bang! (Photo by 4Seasons-Photography.com) As a child
in 1967, I remember sitting in the passenger seat of our family’s ’65
Ford Fairlane, driving along the back roads of Sonoma County while my
dad, at the wheel, listened to Chuck Cecil’s radio show, The Swingin’
Years, featuring big bands of the ’40s – the decade of my father’s
youth. While apple orchards and chicken farms whizzed by, my dad would
name every song from the opening chord. He played string bass in local
jazz bands and classical orchestras, and when the Beatles captured the
hearts of teens across the country, he simply wasn’t interested. In
his opinion, they just didn’t have the musical chops of Count Basie,
Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald or his favorite, Frank Sinatra.
My father and the big bands he was weaned on – once a centerpiece of
American culture – are now ghost presences. Today, L.A.’s oldie FM
radio stations, KRTH and KLOS, replay the Stones and the Beatles et
al. in endless nostalgic loops for baby boomers who feel that Fergie,
Snoop Dogg or Christina Aguilera just don’t have the chops of, say, Van
Morrison or Rod Stewart. And so it goes, the endless procession of what
we presume to be seminal slowly trudging to the outskirts of oblivion.
Two plays on local stages feature characters feeling adrift, on the
wrong side of a generation gap, their core values upended by youth.
Anthony Mora’s Bang!, playing in Toluca Lake’s Sidewalk Studio Theater,
concerns 40-year-old journalist John (Rico Simonini) and a precocious
17-year-old damsel-in-distress named Janie (Jennifer Tetlow), who’s
caught between a cult she’s about to enter (headed by an ex-con)
and the deprogrammer her mother has hired to hoist her back to
"reality." Janie’s mother has also hired – and had an affair with –
John’s childhood friend, an attorney named Charley, who’s far more
concerned about the pernicious effects of the deprogrammer than those
of the cult. John intervenes on Charley’s behalf, stepping into
Janie’s life and whisking the reluctant Lolita away to the secret
refuge of John’s New York apartment.
In those few days back East, the interplay between John (an awkward
bundle of frayed nerves from his marital failure and consequent
sexual abyss) and the psychotic virgin seductress (who’s both a
provocateur and the fountain of John’s lost youth) is a study of
characters untethered from guiding principles. Their most erotic
intersection comes in a scene of mutual masturbation. The self-involved
intensity of that act, with its abject isolation, is an astonishing
and perverse depiction of the gap not only between men and women but
between generations aching but unable to merge. What unfolds in Mora’s
novel, on which he bases his play, is a blend of Nabokov and Bret
Easton Ellis, and closely resembles Jane Campion’s movie Holy Smoke,
though the Campion film appeared a year after Bang!’s first printing,
in 1998. Mora’s play is a shadow of his novel, with too many offstage
characters and frayed story connections that are fully developed in
the book. Still, Christian Kennedy’s direction of the shadow play
has a rawness that is both excruciating and exciting.
Roberto Sanz Sanchez, playing a white-clad, sandaled guru, opens the
drama with a monologue. On the night I attended the tiny theater,
Sanchez’s performance was slightly self-conscious from the get-go,
but about half a minute into his soliloquy, the sound of somebody
urinating into a backstage toilet accompanied him – presumably some
fellow actor or stagehand, unaware that the play had begun. Audience
heads turned in the direction of the waterfall and its eventual
cessation, everyone anticipating the flush that never came. Through
all this, Sanchez persevered with stoic determination and Olympian
powers of concentration.
The play contains many scenes, between which director Kennedy
orchestrates momentum-stifling set changes in dark silence. The
nondescript, uncredited set – a pullout bed, a sofa and a table –
contributes to an anti-theatricality that, after a while, has a
perplexing seductiveness. This may also be the effect of Tetlow and
Simonini’s completely unmannered presence, which smacks more of an
improvisation than a play. Tetlow endows her svelte, sassy blonde Janie
with Valley-girl intonations, while Simonini’s tongue-tied journalist
sounds straight out of Jersey. The pair’s theater-verite acting style
leaves us not quite knowing what’s going to happen next – how the plot
is going to turn, or whether or not lines will be remembered – which
gives the production an unorthodox tension-laced appeal. All of which
proves that theater doesn’t have to be polished to be engaging, though,
clearly, lack of polish is not necessarily a formula for success. Ann
Convery is also quite good as one of the cult’s fallen disciples.
Under the siege of Janie’s blunt appraisals, elliptical reasoning,
and bouts of pouting and mockery, John’s ostensible rescue of her
is actually a direct challenge to who he is and where he thinks he’s
going in life. And neither of the characters emerges the better for it.
Ashot and his mother looking for the future in Little Armenia (Photo
by Ed Krieger)
In Little Armenia, at Hollywood’s Fountain Theater, an Armenian
American father, Gevorg (Jack Kandel), having already suffered one
heart attack, tries desperately to preserve the values of his culture,
and his generation, by preventing the marriage of his daughter, Siran
(Karine Chakarian), to a non-Armenian (Hunter Lee Hughes). What’s
next? Forbidding her to listen to Mick Jagger? Such rigid orthodoxy
barely works on the streets of Kabul, let alone Hollywood, where
the play is set. Gevorg’s attitude may be truthful, but his folly is
obvious. Siran’s brother, Ashot (an appealing performance by Ludwig
Manukian), narrates the play. At age 30, he finds himself torn
between the Old World and the New, reckoning with the paradoxes of
assimilation into American life, as well as his own prejudices. The
play is a compilation of his observations on the eponymous neighborhood
bordering Hollywood Boulevard, between Vermont and Western.
Woman friends Beatrice and Azniv (Maro Ajemian and Anoush Nevart)
confide to each other in church and nudge their punch lines about
moving up to Glendale. Azniv wants to open a vegetable shop.
Suddenly, Beatrice has cancer. (There has to be a more original way
to elicit pathos.) A teenager (Johnny Giacalone) drops out of high
school to work at Jons grocery store. He’s torn between the integrity
of one friend (Salem Michael) from a wealthy family, and the sleazy
appeal of a street thief (RB Dilanchian). In an incident surrounding
some stolen money, he makes a decision to follow his moral compass
for no particular reason that’s dramatized. Earnest and observant,
Little Armenia banks on characters so diligently researched that they
border on stereotypes, slogging through intergenerational conflicts
with a romanticism that’s almost ingratiating. What’s missing are
the unexpected turns that make any story memorable. Dylan Thomas’
play Under Milk Wood – a portrait of a village, filled with poetry
and idiosyncratic characters – comes to mind, as does the oddball
charm of Liev Schreiber’s film Everything Is Illuminated, about
an American visiting his ancestors’ Ukrainian village and landing
upon some harrowing truths about generational divides. As part of a
community-outreach effort, the theater commissioned Armenian writers
Lory Bedekian, Aram Kouyoumdjian and Shahe Mankerian to develop this
script about the neighborhood surrounding the theater. Little Armenia
is a nice try, a snapshot that really needs to be a portrait.