Asbarez: Theater Review: ‘The Key Collector’

BY VAHE KIENTS

YEREVAN — New York–based actress Nora Armani appeared on Yerevan’s stage with a striking one-woman performance: “The Key Collector”, written by Samvel Tor Martirosyan and directed by Hakob Ghazanchyan. The production’s brief run, which opened on November 29, left an impression far greater than its duration. Like a comet crossing the theatrical sky, it arrived unexpectedly, burned brightly, and vanished—yet not without leaving a lingering trace in the memory of its audience.

That resonance carried forward to March 23, when Armani returned to Yerevan to present the work to the jury of the 25th Annual Artavazd Awards and the Yerevan audience. The response was as powerful as the opening performances, though the jury withheld its verdict until the official ceremony.

The production’s impact was confirmed at the Artavazt Awards held at the Konstantin Stanislavski Dramatic Theatre, on International Theatre Day, March 27, when “The Key Collector” was nominated for Best Chamber Production. By decision of the Artavazd Awards jury, actress Nora Armani was awarded the prestigious Artavazd Prize for her performance of the lead role in “The Key Collector.”

As noted in his speech by Hakob Ghazanchyan, chairman of the Union, the production is the result of homeland–diaspora collaboration, with Nora Armani’s contribution being especially significant. Each time Armani visits Armenia, she engages in various theatrical activities—from acting to teaching and conducting masterclasses at higher educational institutions.

Staged at the Union of Theatre Practitioners of Armenia, the 45-minute chamber piece unfolded with emotional precision and quiet intensity. The audience responded with palpable empathy—for homeland, for faith, for cultural inheritance. Their warm, sustained applause, along with the bouquets presented to Armani and the ten young performers from the Galya Novents Theatre School, testified to the performance’s powerful resonance.

At the center of the play is a blind woman—known as the key collector—whom Armani portrays with layered sensitivity. Confined to a wheelchair for much of the performance, the character inhabits a sharply bounded world. Her journey is not expansive but cyclical: from a dimly lit home in a border village to the ruins of a nearby church, and back again.

Those ruins—reduced to two columns and a fractured lintel beam—form both the physical and symbolic core of the play. The heroine tends to them as if they were whole, preserving the illusion of continuity amid collapse. It is here that she rises, leaves her wheelchair behind, and begins her ritual: gathering keys scattered among dust and gravestones.

These keys are not inert objects. Though stripped of practical use, they carry memory, presence—perhaps even a kind of spiritual residue. The key collector understands this. So too do the unseen treasure hunters who haunt the ruins in search of relics. Their presence, though never fully revealed, introduces a quiet but persistent tension—a moral and existential opposition that unfolds beneath the surface of the performance.

A history teacher by profession, the heroine stands as both witness and guardian. Against the pressures of war, displacement, and personal limitation, she asserts her right to remain—to endure. Her blindness, far from diminishing her perception, becomes a source of heightened awareness. Through touch and imagination, she reconstructs a world that others, even with sight, fail to fully grasp.

Director Hakob Ghazanchyan amplifies this inner world through radical minimalism. The stage is bare—devoid of physical set, props, or visual markers. Even the keys exist only metaphorically or through suggestions using different objects, their imagined sound echoing across an empty space. Yet the absence of material scenery gives rise to something richer: a mental architecture formed through movement, gesture, and light.

This is where the ensemble of ten students from the Galya Novents Theatre School becomes essential. Through choreographed motion and physical _expression_, they conjure the ruins—the fallen stones, the arches, the ghost of a once-rising dome. At times lyrical, at times stark, their presence shapes a visual language that is both abstract and deeply evocative.

The result is a layered theatrical experience in which imagination and reality exist in constant tension. The ruins are not only architectural but psychological; the conflict, though unseen, is unmistakably human.

As playwright Samvel Tor Martirosyan suggests, “The Key Collector” resists confinement to a specific time or event. It speaks instead to enduring national anxieties—an unbroken thread of cultural survival set against forces of erasure. Beneath its quiet surface lies a pressing question: how does one reclaim the meaning of origin, of belonging, of purpose?

The answer, the performance implies, is neither simple nor singular. But it begins with recognition—and with resistance. 

The production endures where it matters most: in the shared pulse between stage and audience, memory and meaning. We expect it to return to the Armenia and Diaspora stages in the near future. We wish the creative team well and congratulate Ms. Armani on her award.

Vahe Kients is the author of various journalism and creative media articles, working across genres ranging from simple news reporting to TV, digital, and print reportage, as well as essays, commentary, and political and cultural analysis. He is based in Yerevan.

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