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RIALTO THEATRE 'PRESENTS BEAST ON THE MOON' BY RICHARD KALINOSKI
From January 23 till 27, 2011 the Rialto Theatre presents Richard Kalinoski's "Beast on The Moon", a delicate play about a brutal subject: the genocide launched against the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire in 1915.
Aram Tomasian, the son of an Armenian village photographer who was a minor functionary of the Turkish regime that decreed the exterpation of the Armenian people in a frenzy of ethnic cleansing. The boy Aram stayed hidden by his father's overcoat as his whole family was beheaded. He escaped and made his way to America, where he practices his father's trade and aspires to defeat the genocide by fathering a Tomasian family of his own. The young man has a single preserved family photograph, from which he has cut the faces of his dead relatives and inserted his own face and that of the fifteen year old girl Seta, the "picture bride" he has rescued from an Armenian orphanage and married by proxy. Aram has set himself up as a photographer, specializing in family portraits of the many immigrants who have come to America. Aram prospers because he has a particular talent for making the immigrants children look beautiful. Barely more than a teenager himself, Aram is eager to have a bride with whom to practice their sacred duty and give birth to his father's descendants, who will fill in the picture and restore the Tomasian family to life.
However, Aram's plan does not go smoothly. Seta is very very grateful to be alive and in America. Every day the orphans were dying from disease and malnutrition, and Seta's turn to die might well have come had Mr. Tomasian not sent for her. However, although the picture Aram was given looks like her, it isn't in fact Seta, but another girl, one who is now dead. And grateful as she is to be alive and a wife, Seta is terrified of sex, having witnessed her sister's rape and murder.
Kalinoski tracks the marriage over time as the couple tries and fails to fullfil Aram's plan
Richard Kalinoski has been internationally acclaimed as the author of Beast on the Moon, an intimate drama about an Armenian immigrant couple in Milwaukee whose marriage is haunted by the 1915 genocide. The play has been translated into 12 languages, produced in 17 countries around the world, and showered with awards. In 2001 the Paris production won five Molière awards (the French equivalent of the Tony) including Best Play; that same year, the Buenos Aires production won five Ace awards including Best Play; and in 2004 the play became part of the repertory of the Moscow Art Theatre. First acclaimed in 1995 at the prestigious Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville, Beast on the Moon went on to garner a sheaf of prizes (including the Agnouni Award, the Garland Award, and the Osborn Award from the American Theatre Critics Association) as well as many regional productions throughout the U.S., including a 2005 New York production at Century Center Theatre where it ran for 120 performances. Although not of Armenian heritage himself, Kalinoski was married to an Armenian woman for seven years.
Tickets from RIALTO THEATRE (+357) 25 34 39 00 www.rialto.com.cy
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