Playwright: Adriana Sevahn Nichols. At: Silk Road Rising at The Historic Chicago Temple Building, 77 W. Washington St. Tickets: 312-857-1234, ext. 201, or www.silkroadrising.org; $40. Runs through: Nov. 11
The rolling world premiere of Night Over Erzinga for Silk Road Rising (formerly Silk Road Theatre Project) could have been overly wrought and too melodramatic. That's because Adriana Sevahn Nicols' drama focuses on two survivors of the Armenian genocide of the early 20th century and how it impacts their lives and those of their descendants.
But Nicols wisely eschews a chronological structure to unfold events, shifting back and forth in time to offer foreshadowed clues in the lifelines of her three main characters. Only at the end do we see the totality of the horror faced by one character as it is revealed exactly what happened to her family at the hands of some Turks, and how other Turks conversely aided her to escape after all hope was gone.
Night Over Erzinga revolves around Ardavazt Oghidanian (played as a young man by Levi Holloway and by Rom Barkhordar in advanced age), his wife, Alice (played as a young woman by Sandra Delgado and Diana Simonzadeh in advanced age) and their daughter, Aghavni or "Ava" (either Allison Torf or Maliha A. Yousuf as a little girl, and Delgado as a young woman, though understudy Catherine Dildilian, a granddaughter of genocide survivors, played Delgado's roles at the performance I attended).
Through these characters, we get to piece together their conflicts that arise from the genocide and the aftermath as they try to assimilate in America. Act II in particular focuses on Aghavni's rebellion against her parents to become a dancer, and her promising (if eventually troubled) marriage to aspiring Dominican opera singer Bienvenido Raymundo (Nicolas Gamboa).
Rounding out the talented ensemble are Carolyn Hoerdemann and Michael Salinas in numerous supporting roles that really show off the range of their acting abilities when it comes to different characterizations and spot-on dialect work. But the whole ensemble is wonderful to watch, especially as we follow them as different characters across the generations.
Director Lisa Portes stages the production under Lee Keenan's set design that prominently features a constructed tree with hanging strips of fabric tied to the branches that occasionally get pulled to help delineate scene changes (the symbolic point of the tree is also later revealed). Portes gets very good and poetical performances from her cast.
My only quibble is that some scene changes feature an odd mix of both costumed actors and all-in-black stagehands moving stage furniture on and off. Seeing the stagehands sometimes takes you out of the flow of the show.
Night Over Erzinga successfully tugs at your heartstrings. But it also succeeds in making audiences question difficulties of assimilation, the stigma of being victims and how seemingly insurmountable generational differences can be bridged.