Richard Kalinoski’s intimate account of Armenian genocide comes to NY
By JERRY TALLMER
Gay City News, NY
April 21 2005
The Shelter of Love
The horrors are planted so deep, they all but wreck the marriage
before it begins for Aram Tomasian and Seta, the child bride that
Tomasian, as she calls him, had imported from Istanbul to Milwaukee
in 1921. It was in fact another girl’s photograph that had been sent
to him-he himself, Aram Tomasian, was an up-and-coming photographer
in Milwaukee-but Seta wasn’t bad looking, she was quiet, so she’d do.
Except for the nightmares. When Tomasian saw his wife driving nails
into the arms of her doll, he thought she was crazy. But then it came
out. Seta found her tongue. “My mother nailed into wood-crucified
by the Turks-because she would not forsake her God! My sister raped.
Because I was a child, I was left.”
And then it also came out, from her husband, her stiff strange husband,
who cut the heads off his family photographs. On another day, back
in that other country, he had run from his hiding place, a hole in
the floor, out into the backyard where his mother had a clothesline
for the wash, and on that clothesline the Turks had hung the heads
of his mother, his father, his sister, his brother, everybody.
Ninety years ago this month, on April 24, 1915, a genocide that would
result in the deaths of a million and a half Armenians at the hands
of the Turks began-the slaughter that Hitler cited as prelude to his
own. Yet, who today remembers the extermination of the Armenians?
On April 27, the New York City premiere of a play called “Beast on
the Moon”-having to date been seen in 17 other countries and some
45 American cities-takes place. The piece is now in previews at the
Century Center for the Performing Arts, on East 15th Street.
It’s a play about the Armenian genocide. But apart from all the
horrors, the man who wrote it wants to stress, this is a love
story-Aram and Seta’s story-showing what people can make of their
lives even with all these horrible things.
The writer’ name is Richard Kalinoski, and his own blood, he said the
other day, is “one-half Polish American, about one-quarter Irish,
some German in there, and some other stuff I don’t know.” Nothing
Armenian. But from 1972 until a divorce in 1979, Kalinoski was
married to an Armenian-American woman from Racine, Wisconsin, whose
grandparents were survivors of the Armenian genocide of 1915.
“Her grandmother was a sweet, charming, compelling woman who spoke
Armenian and had herself been a child bride of 14 or 15, ostensibly
plucked from some orphanage in Istanbul,” Kalinoski recalled. “She
had struggled in her own life, against a dictatorial husband, for
the opportunity and the right to learn to read. I like to think an
image of her lives on in Seta.”
Back in 1972, Kalinoski-“wanting to explore what I call courage
in the face of the beast, especially the courage in some women to
cope quietly, and sometimes not so quietly”-had, on the basis of
interviews with members of his then-wife’s family, written a “very
different, very much more literal” play about the Armenian genocide.
It was called “Lifeline,” but it did not have a life.
In 1991, when Kalinoski was teaching playwriting and English at
Nazareth College in Rochester, New York, a colleague who read that
earlier play and “had said to me: ‘There’s something powerful there,
maybe you should revisit these people.'”
Kalinoski conducted as many interviews as he could with thoughtful
Armenian Americans in Rochester-“a small community with only one
church, and not even a church building”-and came up with the central
dramatic idea of a child bride.
He also started reading: Michael Arlen’s “Passage to Ararat,”
Franz Werfel’s “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh,” the dispatches of Hans
Morgenthau, former U.S. ambassador to Turkey, and poet Peter Balakian’s
“The Black Dog of Fate.”
The actors in the New York premiere are Omar Metwally, Louis Zorich,
Matthew Borish, and, as Seta, Lena Georgas.
About the crucifixion of Seta’s mother:
“Lots of survivors have told how the Turkish gendarmes liked to make
examples out of Christians, and there is evidence of crucifixions. I
would not say it was common,” Kalinoski said, “but I have seen
photographs of it. Also of decapitations.”
How come it has taken “Beast in the Moon” so long to get to New York?
“Well, we could do a whole interview about that. Just let me say
that along the way I had some terrible offers, where I would not be
part of the artistic process. So I said no, a lot. Some were so bad,
it was easy to say no. Though I desperately wanted New York.”
Two people who have been instrumental in bringing it here are
co-producer David Grillo, who fell in love with the show when, as an
actor, he played Aram in a 1998 New Repertory Theater production in
Newton Square, Massachusetts, and director Larry Moss, who, said the
playwright, “in launch week of rehearsals here proved to be a source
of epiphany and revelation in everything regarding the play.”
Kalinoski has never yet been to Armenia, but he is going there soon,
to Yerevan, where on July 6 two productions of “Beast on the Moon”
are to open, one by the Moscow Art Theater and one by the Armenian
State Youth Theater.