12/09/25: Meet the CartoziansWhat: 2nd Stage presents Talene Monahon's play about the Armenian people in America and their complicated history with conditional whiteness and assimilation. Its first act based on the true story behind the 1925 court case United States vs. Cartozian, in which Tatos Cartozian, a survivor of the Ottoman Empire's genocide of Armenians, was about to become a naturalized U.S. citizen but suddenly had that citizenship revoked. In his subsequent trial his attorney successfully argued that Armenians counted as white people rather than Asian, and were therefore permitted American citizenship (archaic laws regarding citizenship limited eligibility to white and Black people only). The play's second act takes place a century later, as Tatos Cartozian's descendant stars on her own reality show (a stand-in for the Kardashian family) and is interviewing four people of Armenian descent to discuss what their Armenian identity and traditions mean to them. Over the course of this discussion, the question of whiteness is again interrogated, with some characters insisting Armenians are white while others are adamant they are part of the larger SWANA amalgam of ethnicities and therefore not white.
And? The above summary sounds pretty cold and clinical when written out, but I wanted to articulate the larger questions and theme of the show. But the story told is incredibly heartfelt and deeply personal. It's impressive when a playwright is able to take on a philosophical argument--with far-reaching implications--without making the play feel like a lecture or a debate. Here, every argument is grounded in full characters who all have something to lose and a desperate need to hold their own ground. David Cromer is truly a fine director, always able to drill down to the deeply human in his productions, and I'll be interested to read the script to see what moments were Monahon's and what were Cromer's. I'm thinking of the decade-spanning thousand-yard stare of both of Nael Nacer's characters as a quiet roaring is heard, perhaps in his head, perhaps in our collective memories. The dark history of a monstrosity survived even as the scars from the trauma linger on. The cast is doing terrific work, from Andrea Martin's reliably scene-stealing work that manages to be both hilarious and heartbreaking, to the quiet dignity of Nael Nacer's work especially in the first act, to Will Brill's continuing to show off his wide range, to, well everyone, but those are the three I wanted to highlight.
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Will Brill, Andrea Martin, and Nael Nacer as Wallace McCamant,
Markrid Cartozian, and Tatos Cartozian. Photo by Julieta Cervantes. |
What: The Shed presents a new play adapted from three of Tom Hanks's short stories, about Bert, a man in 2089 who becomes enamored of traveling in time to the New York World's Fair in 1939--and the woman he meets there.
And? One of the important lessons I learned in my twenties, both from a very good creative writing teacher and from The Shakespeare Forum, is the importance of meeting a piece of work on its terms rather than the terms you think it should be. So this is going to be a mix of my attempt to meet this play on its own terms but also contending with it within the larger context of theater. To handle the latter part first, the stakes and tension never feel fully established: it's not clear the importance of the work Bert is neglecting and ultimately abandoning when he keeps returning to 1939, and so his choice seems obvious and easy. Meanwhile, the MacGuffin of the damage time travel can wreak--as well as the deus ex machina of overcoming that MacGuffin--are glossed to the extent that those stakes also don't feel particularly grounded or real. As a play in the larger context of how plays usually work, it seems a weaker, flimsier piece.
But I was still touched by the love story, so I need to also meet this piece on its own terms. And it deserves that from me especially, since the majority of my fiction writing doesn't pivot on the tensions you would see in traditional stories, but rather engaging in characters and moments in time. So if we agree that it's not the writers' intent to really delve into what it's like in the future or the important work being accomplished there, if we engage instead with the emotional themes, perhaps we can land where the play and production would like us to land. Where when we look neither toward the utopian future nor toward a nostalgia-tinted past, but focus rather on the immediate need to engage with the present. When Bert travels back in time it's a bit like Groundhog Day, he can visit only one day in one location over and over again, but he can choose how to play with the nuances within that. That day is all he has, but the same is true for Carmen, the woman he meets and falls in love with. Carmen has a past she'd rather not revisit and a future that feels uncertain and unknowable. She focuses intensely on the present, on what she can do with her today. And here in this day is when they can meet and perhaps both find a second chance at life and love. The charisma and chemistry between Hanks and his costar Kelli O'Hara does a lot of the heavy lifting here, reminiscent of Hanks's past films with Meg Ryan. And so that is the play being told: themes of enjoying this precious moment we have, and the fairy tale soulmate love we might find. Meeting the play on those terms, it's a sweet narrative. Perhaps they don't all need to be bombastic.
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Kelli O'Hara and Tom Hanks as Carmen Perry and Bert Allenberry.
Photo by Mark J. Franklin. |
