If Andrea Martin ever offers you a plate of food, accept it and declare it the most delicious thing you have ever eaten—or prepare to be turned into dust by the deadly glare that will be fixed upon you.
In the first act of Talene Monahon’s exquisite, award-worthy play Meet the Cartozians, the Tony Award-winning Martin plays the Cartozian family’s formidable grandmother, who keeps a witheringly judgmental eye on all the unfolding events and intrigues within the Armenian American’s family home in Depression-era America.
If the title of this both very funny and very powerful 2nd Stage production (Signature Theatre, booking to Dec. 14) seems inferringly familiar, it’s deliberate. With a character very like Kim Kardashian appearing at its climax, the frisson of that family’s celebrity provides a sugared pill for a much larger and profound tale of family, identity, racism, and history told in two distinctively different but complementary acts.
The first act is set in 1923/4 in Portland, Oregon, the second a hundred years later in Glendale, California, in 2024, with an exceptional cast of six playing different, and sometimes meaningfully echoing, characters in each era.
Directed by David Cromer, Meet the Cartozians begins with a visit to the Cartozians’ home in 1923 by an Irish American lawyer Wallace McCamant, there to help patriarch Tatos (Nael Nacer), who has just had his citizenship revoked, apparently for not being white. This part of the play—with notably lovely costuming by Enver Chakartash—is based on a real-life case.
McCamant is played by the scene-swiping Will Brill, who Stereophonic fans may remember as bass player Reg and who, it was just announced, will play iconic AIDS activist Larry Kramer in the forthcoming play, Kramer/Fauci—re-enacting an infamous TV confrontation between Kramer and Dr. Anthony Fauci in 1993—in New York next year.
Brill, with the comically looming bearing of John Cleese, tries to coach Tatos in speaking louder, in shaving the truth of the past, all in service of making himself more “American.” In return, the Cartozians are both amenable—they, led by capably strong daughter Hazel (Tamara Sevunts) want Tatos and the family to be safe and legally installed in America—and also resistant to having themselves and their keenly cherished roots demeaned.
There are witty misunderstandings and profound questions around language and culture (what makes the Irish McCamant more innately American than them, the family wonder). Son Vahan (Raffi Barsoumian) may be too “hairy” (i.e. too obviously Armenian) and aggressive to attend court. Behind the backchat and flurry of food and rugs being offered as gifts—including an extremely mortifying bottle of whisky—the thump of very real peril thrums as the Cartozians contemplate their home and dedicatedly built business being taken from them.
Meet the Cartozians interrogates what it means and doesn’t mean to be Armenian, American, white, judged not to be white, and an immigrant, all in playful, practical, intellectual, and very personal terms.
This comes into a more ribald and contemporary focus in act two. Here, the set (strikingly designed in both eras by Tatiana Kahvegian) has been transformed into a lush Glendale 2024 home, where a star who sounds very much like Kim Kardashian is about to show up to film a scene in a show that sounds very much like Keeping Up With the Kardashians. Nacer, Barsoumian, Brill, and Susan Pourfar (the latter appeared only briefly in the first act) are now playing a group of Armenian community luminaries dragooned into speaking to the celebrity about her roots on camera.
Except the celebrity doesn’t show up on time—in her seat is a plastic container containing the salad she has requested. The arguments of 1924 around identity, geography, and race erupt more volubly in 2024, with Brill playing, again scene-swipingly, a production assistant who causes utter chaos when he angrily claims that being Irish is akin to being Black. When the star finally appears, played by Sevunts as an almost ethereal being emerging from the shadows with Kardashian-y vowels, it is to have a final, moving exchange with Nacer’s character.
With clarity, wit, and depth, Meet the Cartozians achieves something much cleverer than predictable satire or worthy lecture. This thought-provoking comedy-drama’s standout moment—and biggest belly laugh—comes from Martin’s character in act two, when the stage suddenly goes dark. Her line is not about one of the play’s bigger themes, but its out-of-nowhere brilliance seals why Meet the Cartozians next deserves to travel a few blocks east—and conquer Broadway.
