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A Girl’s War is well fought
BY ELLEN PFEIFER
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A Girl’s War
By Joyce Van Dyke. Directed by Rick Lombardo. Set by Richard Chambers. Costumes by Denitsa Bliznaková. Lighting by Dan Meeker. Sound by Haddon Kime. With Katarina Morhacová, Benjamin Evett, Mason Sand, Bobbie Steinbach, and Dan Domingues. At New Repertory Theatre through October 19.
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In the final lines of A Girl’s War, traumatized protagonist Anahid Sarkisian asks the question "How did this happen?" as she surveys the wartime devastation around her. In fact, Joyce Van Dyke’s compelling play about the current murderous "cease-fire" in the Armenia/Azerbaijan conflict in the Southern Caucasus Mountains region of Nagorno-Karabakh demonstrates in detail how it happens. Individual by individual, family by family, the cycle of vengeful murder and pillage regenerates itself. Each new atrocity spawns new horrors. A Girl’s War is in its world premiere at New Repertory Theatre after being seen in 2001 in a workshop production at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre. The script won the 2001 John Gassner Memorial Playwriting Award and the 2001 Provincetown Theatre Company Playwriting Competition and has been designated a finalist for the 2003 Jane Chambers Award. In Rick Lombardo’s intensely intimate staging, what remains of the Armenian Sarkisian family resides in a wreck of a cottage, a kind of corrugated lean-to designed by Richard Chambers. Both Sarkisian sons have died in the conflict, including the 21-year-old, clarinet-playing, non-combatant shepherd Seryozha. Anahid, the only daughter and a successful fashion model in America, returns to the village after Seryozha’s death. She finds that her mother, Arshaluis, has channeled her grief into action; she’s a sniper for the Armenian army. Every night she hides in the mountains and trains her machine gun on enemy soldiers. How to end the struggle? Arshaluis offers this hopeless prescription: erase history and give us enough money to rebuild the country. Not intending to stay, the thoroughly Americanized Ana wants nothing to do with the conflict. It isn’t her war. But then she reconnects with Ilyas, an Azerbaijani guerrilla who used to be a close family friend. In fact, he and his mother and sisters had lived in the Sarkisian house when Arshaluis and family were forced to evacuate during the most recent war. Ilyas and Seryozha had been favorite playmates as little boys. Yet now, though he claims to be an army deserter, Ilyas is vague about why he’s returned to the village. Nonetheless, he and Ana embark on a torrid romance, the sexual coupling all the more frenzied given the danger and the risk. Further complications develop when an American photographer and his assistant appear seeking Ana, who has both worked for and slept with the cameraman. The consequences are deadly. Despite her Americanized "neutrality," Ana finds she has been sucked into the war — like everyone else in the trans-Caucasus region for hundreds of years. The play makes it points with powerful assertion and compassion for the suffering of all parties. But even at two hours, it’s too long. The opening segment showing Ana in her modeling milieu is overextended, though it does set up the contrast between her artificial life in New York and the "real" life she finds in Armenia. The second act also sags in some of its earlier scenes. Lombardo has melded his cast into a tight ensemble. Czech-born actress and dancer Katarina Morhacová looks just right as Ana: slim, leggy, glamorous before the camera, everyday-pretty in civvies. That’s a good thing because, besides the modeling shots in the first scene, she has a big nude scene later when she and Ilyas take turns in the bathtub. Early on, I found her flirtatious, pouty, exhibitionistic behavior offputting, and I wondered whether she’d have the theatrical muscle for the expressive heavy lifting that comes later. In fact, she has plenty of range, and both her slightly hysterical sexual response to Ilyas and her later shell-shocked trauma are perfectly calibrated. Dan Domingues’s Ilyas is also terrific: dark, jumpy, an emotional grenade. Better still is Bobbie Steinbach’s Arshaluis: stripped of all chic, all cosmetic enhancement, Steinbach gives an unsparing portrait of a peasant mother who’s lost everything but her capacity to remember and to hate. Benjamin Evett’s photographer Stephen is properly brittle and bitchy until Armenia shows him what real suffering feels like. And Mason Sand, in the double role of Tito the assistant and Seryozha’s ghost, is sweet and vulnerable, a double victim.
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