Night Over Erzinga, the premiere of a new play at the South Side Theatre (Magic Theatre, Fort Mason) in San Francisco by Adriana Sevahn Nichols about refugees from the Armenian genocide coming to America and what they and their descendants face, by both remembering and forgetting the past, is the first event in a collaborative National New Plays Initiative between Golden Thread, Silk Road Theatre Project (Chicago) and the Lark Play Development Center (New York), Middle East America.
An excellent cast–Natalie Ammanian, Neva Marie Hutchinson, Terry Lamb, Sarita Ocon, Lawrence Radecker, Juliet Tanner and Brian Trybom–with the unusually clarity of Hafiz Karmali’s direction has brought life to a mixed perspective of immigrants trying to escape the past, to find themselves … assisted by Penka Kouneva’s unusual original music, by designers Mikiko Uesugi (scenery), Jim Cave (lighting), Michelle Mulholland (costumes) and Mitchell Greenhill (sound).
–snip– The production is one of the most lucid I’ve seen recently on a Bay Area stage. Karmali–himself a muslim of the Aga Khan’s sect–and his players of various backgrounds illuminate the refugees’ experience, show their inner lives and point to both the difference of cultural origins and the improvisatory experiment of American assimilation, revealing good and bad in the roots and in the results.
Ismailimail 