Kim Kardashian may be the most famous Armenian American to ever live — and a character very much modeled on the ubiquitous reality TV star and entrepreneur makes a noteworthy cameo toward the very end of Talene Monahon’s engaging and edifying two-part drama Meet the Cartozians. (The Second Stage production, directed by David Cromer, opened Monday at Pershing Square Signature Center.) Played by Tamara Sevunts with a breathy vacancy that masks an underlying intelligence lurking just beneath the bedazzled surface, the character billed in the script as “The Celebrity” offers an ingenious filter for Monahon’s examination of the experience of Armenian American immigrants over the last century.
The first act, set in 1923 in the handsome Portland, Oregon, drawing room of the Cartozian family, is based on a real legal case involving a Christian rug merchant named Tatos Cartozian who fled his native land during the Turkish-led massacre of Armenians a decade before. Cartozian’s citizenship was challenged by the U.S. government, who argued that he was ineligible due to immigration laws restricting naturalization to white people and, following the Civil War, people of African descent. But Armenia — sandwiched between modern Turkey, Iran, Georgia, and Azerbaijan — is very much an Asian country geographically, or arguably Middle Eastern. And that suggested that Armenians might suffer the fate of the Indian and Japanese men whom the Supreme Court had barred from citizenship in 1922 and 1923 by upholding race-based immigration laws from the early 20th century.
Tatos Cartozian (Nael Nacer) has managed to attract an Irish American lawyer (Will Brill) from a white-shoe firm to take his case — and to argue that he is in fact a good white Christian man worthy of citizenship despite his somewhat swarthy complexion and employment of “Mohammedans” at the looms back in Persia. You almost feel for Wally McCamant trying to make the best possible case for Tatos even as he learns more about the family and how its Armenian traditions set the community apart — celebrating Christmas on January 6, eating exotic treats with flavors so offputting that he spits them out into his handkerchief. There’s also the tricky dynamics of Tatos’ family, from his food-pushing mother (Andrea Martin) to his practical-minded son (Raffi Barsoumian) to his earnest and fair-skinned daughter (Tamara Sevunts) to his shell-shocked wife (Susan Pourfar), rendered nearly speechless since surviving the genocide of her people back home.
There are references to other Cartozians — Tatos’ older brother, who became naturalized several years before — but Monahon mostly succeeds at outlining the major issues of race and assimilation involved as well as sketching in elements of the family’s attempts to honor their traditions in a new place. The first act could use some tightening, especially given the static nature of Tatiana Kahvegian’s set and Stacey Derosier’s lighting — though both grow more dynamic in the second act, which takes place in a spacious apartment in Glendale, California, that has been turned into a brightly lit soundstage for a Christmas episode of the celebrity’s reality TV show.
Her producers have assembled four members of the Armenian community to help her explore her roots: a city councilman who remembers meeting the star at a charity event several years before (Nael Nacer); a UCLA history professor (Raffi Barsoumian); a grandmotherly figure who’s well-versed in Armenian causes (Andrea Martin); and the apartment’s owner, Leslie (Susan Pourfar), who describes herself as an “activist, artist and organizer” who’s also a published poet. The four have very different agendas for their TV appearance, and vary wildly in how they feel about the reality star who’s given them this opportunity.
After introducing us to a very insular family unit in Act 1, it’s refreshing to see diverging opinions that reflect the very sharp divides within the community over issues that still seem to be roiling from Tatos Cartozian’s time. Are Armenians white? Are they European or Asian? Is there even such a thing as the Middle East or is that itself a problematic term that centers Western Europe as the point of reference for the rest of the world? To Martin’s Rose, this is all academic nonsense, a question of semantics that she’s eager to dismiss because she sees herself as a white, European woman defending her people from their historic enemies, the Turks.
But the others see more nuance here, reflecting the broad spectrum of their complexions. They identify themselves as outsiders despite repeatedly being told they are “too white” for some programs and opportunities (One of Leslie’s “genocide poems” was rejected from a POC poetry contest). They also identify some problematic issues that remain unresolved since Cartozian’s time that are exacerbated by reality stars like Kim Kardashian and her line of self-tanners and other beauty products. “Her ancestors worked real hard to be white so that, one hundred years later, she could work real hard to be black,” Barsoumian’s professor notes. “Her work is about her beauty, right? How she looks? Being legally white but looking exotic. Celebrating Christmas but looking Muslim. You wanna talk about the fucking self-tanner??”
This is fascinating, complicated stuff — and the Armenian characters have a perfect foil in the decidedly white production assistant (Will Brill) who’s been babysitting them while the star is getting glammed up. As in the first act, this is a somewhat clueless outsider who serves as both a sounding board and an avatar of the average (non-Armenian) viewer — but both men also reflect certain blinkered prejudices of the dominant culture. What elevates the show further is the final scene, where the Kardashian-like star makes an unexpected appearance that upends what we thought we knew about her (including from her staff) and kicks the entire show into a direction that is surprising, touching, and almost wistful. Sevunts, who is a mesmerizingly stabilizing force as the Cartozian daughter Hazel in the first act, delivers a performance as the celebrity that goes beyond caricature to spotlight the complicated depths of Monahon’s script. ★★★★☆
MEET THE CARTOZIANS
Pershing Square Signature Center, Off Broadway
Running time: 2 hours, 40 minutes (with 1 intermission)
Tickets on sale through December 7 for $86 to $136
Culture Sauce 