HERE TO TORTURE, INSTRUCT AND PROTECT
By Jerry Tallmer

The Villager
eretotorture.html
May 28 2009

Ayvasian inspired by the power of pounding music, high boots

These boots were made for walking, and that’s just what they’ll do.

One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you.

–Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood, 1966

Everybody has a dirty little secret in Leslie Ayvasian’s "Make Me."

Hank and Sissy’s dirty little secret is that they are all washed up
and don’t know it.

Eddie and Connie’s dirty little secret is that Eddie is too bored
to take seriously the power games Connie pursues as soon as their
two girls are packed off to school every morning. Indeed, he plays
along — until it’s too late.

Phil’s dirty little secret is Mistress Lorraine, the dominatrix to
whose "dungeon" he goes to every day for punishment, by words and
whip, for being a weak, lousy mayor of the New Jersey town in which
they all live — and Phil isn’t his real name either.

The strands of these six lives, or three pairs — Hank and Sissy, Eddie
and Connie, Phil and Mistress Lorraine — are crisscrossed together
like intermeshing spiders’ webs by the playwright who did as much,
and more, for those reality based "Nine Armenians" of her own personal
bloodlines 13 years ago. There were no boots and whips in that poetic
drama, except perhaps on the feet and in the hands of Turkish soldiers
in 1915 slaughtering Armenians in the Forgotten Holocaust.

Here, in "Make Me," at the Atlantic Stage 2 on Chelsea’s West 16th
Street, it is to Mistress Lorraine in her Lower East Side dungeon
— in the midst of one of Phil’s groveling penitential sessions —
that Connie has come for instruction on how to wield a whip and make
it sting, how to swagger-stride in those huge high dominating boots,
all that.

So how did Connie find a dominatrix to study from? Why, on the
Internet, of course — just the way real-life Leslie Ayvasian,
playwright and sometime actress, found a real-life dominatrix to
educate the "Make Me" company in whip handling, boot swagger, and
other such matters.

"She comes to rehearsals and is absolutely fantastic," Ms. Ayvasian
said one morning last week; just before heading for Providence,
Rhode Island, for her son’s graduation from Brown University.

One doesn’t suppose your dominatrix taught the male actors how to whip.

"No," the playwright replied dryly,

The first sparks of "Nine Armenians" and of "Make Me" had flashed
upon her, she says, in different ways.

"With ‘Nine Armenians’ it was the single image of an Armenian-American
family in the driveway of their house, packing a car with food and
memories though they would only be separated a couple of hours."

"I was away too much [as an actress] when my son was growing up. So
I wrote ‘Nine Armenians’ for him.

"With ‘Make Me’ it was several things. First, my son the lead guitarist
and his rock band — this loud, pounding music that normally I would
not choose to be around. But here was my darling son, Ivan Anderson,
making this music since he was in seventh grade, and now he was a
senior at Brown!

"He’d even composed music for me when I was driving a car, and with
all this I started thinking in very literal terms about the kind of
power in this throbbing, pounding music that I’d found inspiring in
a way I hadn’t expected.

"That was one component.

"Another — this will sound funny — occurred when I was participating
in an actors’ workshop with Olympia Dukakis six years ago, when Ivan
was a senior in high school.

"This woman came in — I don’t know her name, never did — wearing
these huge, high boots. She saw me eyeing them, and said to me:
‘What size are you?’ and then handed them to me to wear. I started
walking around the room, and as I walked I felt a kind of power. When
I got back to my chair my shoes were gone and there was a note on
the chair saying she’d taken them. It left me with no choice except
to walk to my car in these huge, high boots."

The scenes (or intersecting fragments of scenes) in Mistress Lorraine’s
dungeon are comedic and degrading all rolled into one, for Mistress
Loraine, like Leslie Avasian’s Internet find, is, no matter how
domineering, a teacher, a painstaking — and pain-giving–instructor
at heart.

There is even a whiff of Jean Genet here.

MISTRESS: Foot fetish, pony play, leatherfetish, role play

CONNIE: Pony play?

MISTRESS: Pick up a crop. Flick it like this on the back of the
head. Remember pony play, Phil?…What did you do?

PHIL: I galloped, Mistress.

MISTRESS: Whar dud I do?

PHIL: Sat on my shoulders and gripped my head between your legs,
Mistress.

Suddenly I see, as if it were yesterday, tall, gorgeous Salome Jens
galloping around gloriously naked, tossing her long hair, whip in
hand, as the Pony Girl in José Quintero’s 1960 production of Genet’s
"The Balcony" at Circle-on-the-Square on Bleecker Street.

All of which brings us to a topic of some current national interest:
Torture. Does "Make Me’ not have some relevance here?

"To tell you the truth, not really," says the woman who wrote
it. "Not like Christopher Durang’s play, ‘Why Torture Is Wrong, and
the People Who Love Them.’ You know, the dominatrix and her client
have to have a very pure relationship. It’s like she says in the play
(when instructing Connie on ways and means):

" ‘Before you and your client…embark on a scene, you decide what
he can handle and what the limits are. You’re not here just to
torture. You’re here to protect!’"

Leslie Ayvasian, born-in-Boston Armenian, turns 60 this summer. (Her
play "High Dive" celebrated turning 50.) Ivan’s father is her husband,
prestigious architect Sam Anderson. "He’s very cool," she says. "I’ve
had a crush on him for 33 years."

The director of "Make Me" is Christian Parker. The actors are Jessica
Hecht as Connie, Anthony Arkin as Eddie, Ellen Parker as Sissy,
J.R. Horne as Hank, Richard Masur as Phil, and Candy Buckley as
Mistress Lorraine.

Yes, playwright Ayvasian still has those oversized boots. No, she says,
she doesn’t wear them. Cool.

MAKE ME Written by Leslie Ayvasian Directed by Christian Parker
Presented by Atlantic Theater Company May 31 through June
14 Atlantic Stage 2, 330 West 16th Street (212) 279-4200, or