Oral history and the Playwright: DEPORTED: A DREAM PLAY BY JOYCE VAN DYKE

I first became aware of the playwright Joyce Van Dyke in 2001 at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre when her play  A Girl's War: An Armenian-Azeri Love Story, was first  produced  and was named one of the “top ten” plays of the year by the Boston Globe, a play about the impact of war on family life, a production I remember to this day.

When Joyce Van Dyke and I were talking several years later, she voiced the possibility of writing a play somehow responding to the effort made in the 1970's by the Armenian Library and Museum of America to record the oral histories of survivors of the Armenian Genocide.  We talked about the unforgettable stories, so difficult to remember, so difficult to forget, so difficult to relate, and the problems of actually recording such stories, of entering the home and heart of the survivor and asking that survivor to relive the experience long enough to record his/her story on tape.

Based on the lives of her own grandmother and the mother of Martin Deranian, playwright Van Dyke has grappled with just this problem in her new play DEPORTED, which was presented at the Stanford Calderwood Pavilion in Boston this past Saturday night. It was a free staged reading that was minimally publicized, only 100 people would fit into the room (although I think in fact there were many more than 100 in the audience), and most of them non-Armenian.  And why do I mention ethnicity here?  Because the play was about memory and survival, the Armenian Genocide and the deportation of millions of Armenians from their homeland in Turkey 1915-1923, resulting in the death of 1.5 million Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Turkish government.  The playwright's grandmother lived to tell the tale.

With no stage props and 7 uncostumed actors in front of a curtain, this play, in all its starkness, came alive with Victoria's opening lines. . . and with those opening lines, the audience remained transfixed.

DEPORTED, comes very close to  home for any family who has survived a genocide.  And as I sat in the audience, I wondered how a non-Armenian, watching this play, would be affected. I scanned the audience. It was clear that Armenian and non-Armenian alike, the play had grabbed them and held them to the very last line.

I asked my daughter Nisha about her reaction to the play, she who knows the story all too well from her grandfather and her grandmother.  What she chose to share with me was the following statement made by the Turk involved in the futuristic Turkish Armenian reconciliation movement (Act Three set in 2015), who stated something akin to the following: "I thought you Americans would be able to understand how the Turks feel about this, because who would want to believe that your country would ever want to do anything so terrible, even if it wasn't you or your relatives doing the unspeakable."

Successful it was, so successful that I  am having much difficulty writing this post, as the subject of Van Dyke's new play comes too close to my heart.

Judy Braha directed the reading of Joyce Van Dyke's DEPORTED at the Calderwood Pavillion on May 21, 2011, presented by Boston Center for the Arts and The Publick Theater of Boston.  Bobbie Steinbach (4th from right)  performed powerfully as Victoria, as did Paula Langton as Varter, and Ken Baltin as Harry, with supporting actors Marya Lowry, Elise Manning, Danny Bryck, and Mark Cohen. The play is being prepared for performance at Suffollk University's new Modern Theatre in Boston's Theatre District,  March/April of 2012. Don't miss it.