KATHLEEN CHALFANT SHINES AT THE EL PORTAL IN A STORY OF THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
By Charles McNulty, Times Theater Critic
Los Angeles Times
May 20 2008
CA
‘Red Dog Howls’ by Alexander Dinelaris
In a long and exemplary stage career, Kathleen Chalfant is giving
one of her most shattering performances at the El Portal in North
Hollywood. Audiences beware: It’s a harrowing experience, not for the
faint of heart. Few actresses would be as courageous — never mind
capable — of traversing this particular moral abyss. But then her
searing work in "Angels in America" and "Wit," along with decades of
infusing combustible human truth into classics, couldn’t have prepared
her better for the challenge.
The play, Alexander Dinelaris’ "Red Dog Howls," had its world premiere
Monday in a production sharply directed by Michael Peretzian. The
story concerns the legacy of the Armenian genocide on a troubled
thirtysomething New York writer who’s haunted by psychological ghosts
he wants to banish before his first child is born. But to get to a
place of light, he must tunnel into a pit of darkness that threatens
to swallow his identity, his marriage and even his unborn baby.
Addressing us directly, Michael (Matthew Rauch) explains that after
his father died, he found a stash of his letters. A note instructing
him to burn them is heeded, but not before he jots down the address
of the sender. This clue leads him to a 91-year-old woman, who turns
out to be his grandmother — and the one person who can tell him why
his beloved father and grandfather lived under such a pall.
Related ‘Red Dog Howls’ But answers to agonizing questions do not
come easily, and Dinelaris has written the play as though it were a
detective novel, with Michael leading the investigation, Oedipus-like,
into his mysteriously besieged soul. One can’t help thinking of the
Greeks, even though this isn’t a tragedy but a tale of redemptive
survival. The catastrophe lurks in the past, not the future, but the
events described rival the horror of the House of Atreus, Agamemnon’s
blood-soaked clan who similarly understood a traumatic history as a
hereditary curse.
Michael, who has only the sketchiest sense of his background, doesn’t
want the misery confounding him to be passed down. He’s afraid of
losing his wife, Gabriella (Darcie Siciliano), and ominously reflects
on the way the wives of his grandfather and father vanished from their
lives. "It was, for lack of a more exact term, a plague on our family,"
he says.
Dinelaris’ focus is on the developing relationship between Michael and
his grandmother, Vartouhi, who slowly prepares him for the terrible
knowledge he seeks. She feeds him bowl after bowl of rice pilaf
soup with lemon, which he laps up as nourishment from the Armenian
culture he knows precious little about. She tests his strength,
practically vanquishing him at arm wrestling and somehow lifting him
into bed one night after he falls asleep on her couch. To survive the
Armenian massacres that began in 1915 and wound up decimating a world,
Vartouhi has had to turn herself into steel. And the play affectingly
shows why she cannot readily confide in her grandson. What happened
to her defies speech. The two must inhabit the dim memory together,
often in silence while she lovingly watches him eat.
The material is inherently devastating, which makes some of Dinelaris’
punched-up dramatic strategies seem unnecessary. There’s a bit too much
"character" business going on with Vartouhi, Michael’s intermittent
narration grows ponderous and the ending is marred by a melodramatic
twist that undermines the drama’s credibility.
But for the most part, the production is beautifully executed. Tom
Buderwitz’s sets, particularly his old-world conjuring of Vartouhi’s
Upper Manhattan apartment, are superb. And the onstage musical
accompaniment of composer Ara Dabandjian deepens the mood with its
fusion of Mediterranean sounds.
Rauch is the drama’s solid center, and he lets us feel the urgent
struggle taking place inside Michael as though a clock were ticking
and his very stability were on the line. Siciliano’s Gabriella makes
a formidable spouse — she won’t accept anything less than an equal
partnership. Her edges may be severe, but she reveals an authentic
tenderness as well, and it’s too bad Dinelaris allows her to fade
into the background.
The spine-stiffening cry emanating from "Red Dog Howls," however,
comes courtesy of Chalfant, whose artistry, moral passion,
intelligence and heartbroken humanity combine into an indelible
act of witness-bearing. It’s a miraculous performance, rallying the
forces of art against atrocity and permitting us to see in the midst
of meaninglessness an ember of hope and repair.