Night Over Erzinga is an amazing World Premiere written by the incredible Adriana Sevahn Nichols, a detailed story of one family over a period of three generations. The music by Peter J. Storms is sheer perfection to the moods being set in each of the scenes and the costuming (Elsa Hiltner) and lighting (Sarah Hughey) all add to the sheer magic of the production.
[The] greater resonance of Night Over Erzinga is that so many of our neighbors have tragedy or hardship in the family histories that brought them to North America. Seeing this play, we are gratefully reminded how much we can learn, in very human terms, about our world and our community.
The story’s breadth is massive, and its texture feels like a combination of Fiddler on the Roof and The House on Mango Street, with splashes of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest... Nichols has written a powerful story which is aided immensely by a superb cast.
Portes has assembled a terrific ensemble, with Sandra Delgado as young Alice and grown Ava doing some of the strongest work I've seen from her [...] And Lee Keenan's set, with its overarching tree branches and quotidian kitchen-tile floor, captures the mix of profound family history and daily frustration Nichols lays bare.
As Nichols weaves together the past and present, Lisa Portes’s cast does strong work portraying different roles at various points in time.
[The] acting is exceptional. Director Lisa Porters has the versatile cast morph into different generations of the same people. The talented ensemble tackle the decades long story with zest and sensitivity.
Erzinga is not a story about genocide, but a story about the "collateral damage" of genocide; the shame and shaming of the victims; the stench and aroma of madness that infects and plunders until the victim finds the key -- the lynchpin -- to unshackle themselves, first by finding the ways to accept that bitter herbs rest next to the sweetness of honey and apples in this life, the lives that came before, and Erzinga must be seen and experienced for what it is -- a remarkable work that resonates through all of us with a buy-in to the Family of Humankind.
Sandra Delgado is stellar as young Alice and later as Ava. She has an innate on stage vulnerability that allows her to have two fantastic character arcs. Nicholas Gamboa commands the second act. He is reactive, sultry and emotionally fraught. Gamboa has great on stage chemistry with Delgado, but even more so with Rom Barkhordar’s older Ardavazt. The rest of the cast also turn in remarkable work, including Levi Holloway as the younger Ardavazt, Carolyn Hoerdemann as Ardavazt’s saintly mother, Michael Salinas as a menacing Turkish soldier and the always stunning Diana Simonzadeh who will make you weep for the love of your own mother with her portrayal as the mortal (and ghostly) matriarchs. Director Lisa Portes trusts her actors immensely as it pays off with very real relationships.
The unfathomable atrocity of the Armenian Genocide is the catalyst of Nichols’ drama that pits cultural heritage against assimilation and the family’s continuance against the individual’s dream. Director Lisa Portes has underscored the tumult of those events with stylized deluges into the pair’s childhoods back in Armenia, accompanied by verbally and physically expressed poetics. Under Lee Keenan’s web of metaphoric tree branches, Nichols’ Alice actually bears a passing resemblance to Lewis Carroll’s—this Wonderland, however, far more treacherous.
The wonder and worth of this sprawling show is the T.L.C. that director Lisa Portes pours into every scene. No snapshot in this album goes unremarked or untreasured.
