Playwright: Richard Kalinoski
At: Provision Theatre at the Irish American Heritage Center, 4626 N. Knox
Runs Through: April 29; $25
Phone: 773-506-4429
By Catey Sullivan
'A life must be recorded,' the haunted, haunting Armenian immigrant tells his 15-year-old bride before taking her picture in their new Milwaukee home. Yet in the man's family portrait, black holes gape from where the heads of his siblings and parents once were. In Richard Kalinoski's aching and ultimately redemptive Beast on the Moon, Aram Tomasian has dismembered the loved ones of his past as surely as the Turks did in 1915, when a savage and bloody ethnic cleansing left a million Armenians dead.
At the hands of the Turks, the Armenian bodies were strung up, crucified along the sides of rural roads or decapitated, their heads hung like trophies on clotheslines. As children, Aram and his wife, Seta, witnessed the atrocities. As adults starting new lives in America, they're forced to contend with their potentially crippling losses. In personalizing the tragedy of a nation, Kalinoski succeeds in creating a drama that's both historically and emotionally significant. Beast on the Moon pulses with rage, love and infinite sorrow—all feelings its characters mightily strive to bury, there are raging rivers just below a deceptively smooth surface.
It's clear from the start that director Timothy Gregory understands the pain and the redemption at the core of Beast on the Moon. In helming the piece for the company he founded less than three years ago, Gregory captures hope borne of horror. It's a hope that also speaks to faith—not necessarily a religious faith or even faith in some kind of higher power—but faith in the resilience of human goodness in the face of the worst horrors imaginable.
At the start of Beast on the Moon, Seta is girlish and jubilant just to be alive. ( 'I didn't plan on that!' she gushes joyfully. ) She meets her husband, a photographer, three months after their marriage-by-proxy. He's selected her from a photo, one of many pictures he looked at of orphan girls before choosing one and paying for her passage to America. Aram's decidedly old-school, dryly informing the chattering Seta at one point that when his mother married his father, 'she was not allowed to speak for a year.'
But Seta's exuberance and Aram's taciturn silence are upended by their unspeakably cruel pasts. Before they can be whole as a couple, they have to face the starvation and the butchery they've faced as individuals. Facile pop psychology would be the recourse of a lesser playwright, or the default mode of a lesser director. But Gregory keeps the dark complexity of Kalinoski's story intact, in all its messy brutality.
As Seta, Tiffany Scott has a natural, bubbly ease while Levi Holloway's shadowed, brooding Aram is a near-perfect portrait of both menace and heartbreak. And making every scene he's in a delight is Oliver Kal, as a precocious, rambunctious street urchin with his own dark troubles.
Beast on the Moon reveals beasts in the human condition—and then it shows, wondrously, the capacity of humans to defeat the most awful of those monsters.
