‘DEPORTED’ VEERS FROM REALITIES TO STARK DREAMS
By Jeffrey Gantz
Globe Correspondent
March 12, 2012
Boston Playwrights’ Theatre
Bobbie Steinbach plays Victoria, a survivor of the Armenian genocide,
and Ken Baltin her husband, Harry, in “Deported / A Dream Play.”
It’s hard to make drama – rather than melodrama – out of genocide. If
sentimentality doesn’t overrun your theater piece, anger is apt
to. Or it all turns into propaganda. Joyce Van Dyke’s “Deported,”
which is getting its world premiere from Boston Playwrights’ Theatre
and Suffolk University at the Modern Theatre, doesn’t entirely avoid
propaganda as it attempts to address the Armenian genocide of 1915.
But for the most part, art trumps politics – thanks in no small part
to the feisty performance of Bobbie Steinbach in a role modeled on
Van Dyke’s Armenian grandmother.
Directed by Judy Braha, “Deported” opens in 1938, in an attic in
Providence. There’s a wooden table and chair, and a wicker basket with
a quilt, and an old-fashioned radio, and a woman’s black hat with a
plume and a rose, and a lantern, and a steamer trunk. And water can
be heard dripping. The lights go down, and when they come back up, a
middle-aged woman is lying on the table and a younger one is sitting
on the steamer trunk. “Take my water,” the older woman says. A panel
in the back wall (which appears to be covered with aluminum foil)
opens and an Armenian line dance threads its way across the stage.
Then the voice of the older woman’s husband intervenes, and she
scrambles out of the Old World clothing she has put on just in time
for them to argue about whether their daughter can go to a party and
why dinner is not on the table promptly at 6 p.m.
“Deported” is subtitled “a dream play,” and for much of its 100 minutes
(there is no intermission), you may wonder whose dream it is.
The older woman, Victoria (Steinbach), is a survivor of the genocide;
so is her friend, Varter (Jeanine Kane), but both women lost
their husbands and their children. And though Victoria is living in
Providence in 1938, with a new husband, Harry (Ken Baltin), Varter is
part of a dream world in which figures from their village in the old
Ottoman Empire pop in and out, from Mr. Nazarian (Robert Najarian),
whom Varter marries at 14, to the Turkish gendarme (Baltin) who tells
the women, after their husbands have been taken away, that they are
being “deported” (that is, sent on a death march) to Syria.
The second act is set 40 years later, in Los Angeles, where Victoria
and Harry have moved. Shoshana Epstein (Liz Hayes), representing a
university oral-history project, has come to interview Victoria. This
part is about Turkish denial and Armenian reluctance to remember,
and both are depicted somewhat heavy-handedly.
In the third act, however, Van Dyke is at her dizzyingly whimsical
best. The year is sometime after 2015, and Victoria appears to have
died and gone to Armenian heaven. Or maybe she’s still dreaming. She
shoots a Turk named Cem (Mark Cohen), but he turns out to be the
grandson of a Turkish officer who fell in love with Varter and
saved her, so he doesn’t die. Besides, he thinks it’s his dream,
not Victoria’s. Victoria’s great-grandson, Matthew (Najarian),
shows up and falls for Shoshana’s daughter, Ruby (Hayes); we learn
why Victoria’s daughter Rose (Kane) is so disaffected from her mother.
There is, if not reconciliation, at least renewal, along with
the suggestion that heaven is really just the ultimate theatrical
production.
Most of the actors here are double and triple cast, and if they barely
differentiate among their roles, that just adds to the oneiric effect.
But it’s Steinbach who grounds “Deported.” When she says, “When you
kill people like that, they live forever,” you know it is not just
a dream but also a nightmare.
Jeffrey Gantz can be reached at [email protected].