`Armenians' Is Powerful -- Intiman World Premiere Blends All The Elements Together In Superb Fashion

-------------- THEATER REVIEW --------------

"Nine Armenians" by Leslie Ayvazian. Directed by Christopher Ashley. Produced by Intiman Theatre, Seattle Center. Tuesdays-Sundays through Sept. 9. 626-0782.

The Armenian-American family in Leslie Ayvazian's new play "Nine Armenians" has a terrible time with goodbyes.

In both the opening and closing scenes that bracket this handsomely produced Intiman Theatre world premiere, a cluster of animated relations drag out their leave-takings as long as humanly possible. They press offerings of food on each other, suddenly recall bits of news to tell, get stuck in treetops and locked in bathrooms - anything to postpone separation.

However, Ayvazian's astutely detailed portrait of a clingy Armenian clan (much like her own) underscores that partings are inevitable. No delay tactics can stave off the loss of loved ones, or salve the agony of unhealed historical scars passed from generation to generation.

"Nine Armenians" has been workshopped at theaters all over the country, and its formal debut at Intiman is enhanced by the first-class, superbly fluid staging of Christopher Ashley, with a high-function modular set by Loy Arcenas, Donald Holder's exquisite lighting, and beguiling live music by oud player George Mgrdichian.

The engrossing, pitch-perfect performances by the ensemble cast underscore Ayvaizian's best assets as a budding dramatist: her quasi-absurdist gift for staccato, lightly abrasive comedy, and her keen ear for the way intimates verbally exasperate and nurture one another - sometimes within the same instant.

Yet even though "Nine Armenians" showcases an author of high potential and distinctive voice, at this juncture the episodic 90-minute piece comes through like a loose array of dramatic snapshots - some vivid and incisive, others smudged with sentimentality, rather than a tightly-bound, full-length drama.

Through the interactions between the gentle family patriarch Antry (Bernard Kates), his hearty wife Marie (Barbara Andres), their middle-aged daughter Armine (Charlotte Colavin) and Armine's own brood, Ayvazian explores how three generations bear Armenia's tragic historical burden.

The core of that legacy is the massacre of over 1 million Armenians by the Turks, between 1915 and 1923 - a holocaust never fully documented or legitimized in the world's eyes, but burning like an eternal flame in the hearts of genocide survivors Antry and Marie.

Ani (Julie Dretzin), the idealistic daughter of Armine and her husband John (Sherman Howard), is so affected by her grandparents' vivid memories that she decides to make a pilgrimage to impoverished modern Armenia.

This impulsive mission of mercy is potentially the most dramatic incident in "Nine Armenians," yet it's barely sketched in.

More immediately compelling are the frictions between Aunt Louise (a spirited hypochondriac played to neurotic perfection by Lauren Klein), and her sweet husband Garo (Martin Shakar), impatient brother John and blunt, tender Armine.

Several of the play's funniest, truest, most warmly affecting vignettes occur in a cemetery - one containing Marie's confession to grandkids Ari (Benjamin Fels) and Virginia (Mallery MacKay-Brook) about the wayward remains of a beloved.

The odd fate of the ashes (they get lost in an airport) serves as a wry metaphor for the eternal homelessness of refugees, Armenians as well as others.

"Nine Armenians" shines brightest when Ayvazian conveys such notions indirectly, through behavior and metaphor. She's less persuasive when her characters lapse into speechmaking, force loaded confrontations or come together in the good-hearted but cliched display of female solidarity that ends the play.

Homages to one's own family are hellishly hard to write without lapsing into mawkishness. "Nine Armenians" mostly avoids that pitfall. But one comes away feeling Ayvazian has only just begun to tell her story.