Richard Kalinsoki’s Beast On The Moon may have been performed in over twenty countries and translated into nineteen languages, but its latest incarnation at International City Theatre reveals flaws both in the play itself and in the production now on stage in Long Beach.

The year is 1921 and 15-year-old Armenian refugee Seta (Rachel Weck) has arrived in Milwaukee as mail-order child bride to 23-year-old Aram Tomasian (Travis Leland), himself a survivor of the racially-motivated genocide that saw a million and a half of his fellow Armenians slaughtered by the Ottoman government in what is now the Republic Of Turkey.

Unfortunately for Seta, being married to a man she’s never met means being forced into sex with a stranger, and when it turns out that childhood starvation has left her unable to bear children, her Bible-thumping brute of a husband begins to rue the day she arrived on his doorstep, a sentiment his much younger wife finds herself sharing.

Not only that, but Seta finds herself forced on a day-to-day basis to look at a wall-portrait-sized photograph of her husband’s murdered family with empty circles where heads used to be, a constant reminder of what he has lost and what his barren wife can never give him back.

Talk about a recipe for an unhappy marriage, and with sound designer Dave Mickey throwing cold water on even occasional light-hearted moments (and intermission too) with a lugubrious, virtually non-stop flute soundtrack sure to dampen anyone’s mood, rarely has a first act or intermission felt more morose.

Indeed, only the 1933 arrival of spunky preteen Italian-American orphan Vincent (Nico Ridino) begins to perk things up, while at the same time stirring up yet more miserable memories for both husband and wife.

A quick glance at video clips from a 2015 Chicago production has Aram and Seta speaking their lines in unaccented American English, a more appropriate directorial choice than the one caryn desai has made at ICT.

After all, Armenians don’t speak their own language with “an Armenian accent.” They only have a foreign accent when speaking another language, and throughout Act One at least, Aram and Seta are presumably conversing in their native tongue, rendered here in an English distorted by so many rolled r’s, Leland and Weck’s tongues must be exhausted by evening’s end.

Not that playwright Kalinoski shows any awareness of the linguistic problems his characters would experience when out and about in the world around them. (Seta talks a lot about chatting with local Italians, but never once mentions any difficulty she might be having expressing herself in a language she’s new at.) And when Vincent shows up in Act Two with his straight-outta-Brooklyn palaver, Seta speaks second-language English with the same perfect command of grammar and vocabulary she exhibited before intermission and not like an immigrant who’s most likely picked it from non-native-speaking neighbors.

Problematic too is seeing a girl not yet of an age to give her consent (a particularly sore point in today’s #metoo America) being coerced into sex with a stranger eight years her senior, and each and every time Aram takes out his Bible to spout proscriptive scripture, this too strikes a sour cord given today’s increasingly strident, law-making religious right.

Finally, though contemporary audiences might be able to distinguish between WWII Nazis and today’s Germans in The Diary Of Anne Frank, such may not be the case with what feels like a wholesale condemnation of the people of Turkey.

As for the work being done on the Beverly O’Neill stage, I’d likely find myself raving about Leland and Weck’s dynamic, deep-digging performances were it not for the foreign accents they’ve been saddled with.

The talented young Ridino, on the other hand, scores points for his little Mr. Tough Guy vowels, not a trace of which remain in his senior-citizen incarnation (a nicely understated Tony Abatemarco as The Gentleman, who serves as narrator, though not always to the play’s benefit).

Scenic designer/technical director JR Norman Luker has come up with an appropriately dingy Milwaukee apartment surrounded by bones and skulls, Donna Ruzika’s lighting is subtle and evocative, and ICT resident designers Kim DeShazo (costumes), Patty and Gordon Briles (properties), and Anthony Gagliardi (hair and wig design) do their accustomed fine work.

Lily Guevara is assistant scenic designer. Victoria A. Gathe is production stage manager and Sebastian Villar is assistant stage manager. Casting is by Michael Donovan, CSA. Richie Ferris, CSA is casting associate.

If good intentions were all that mattered, then International City Theatre’s production of Richard Kalinoski’s Beast On The Moon would merit raves. Unfortunately, for this reviewer at least, good intentions do not suffice.

Beverly O’Neill Theater at the Long Beach Performing Arts Center, 300 E. Seaside Way., Long Beach.
www.InternationalCityTheatre.org

–Steven Stanley
August 23, 2019
Photos: Tracey Roman

Tags: International City Theatre, Los Angeles Theater Review, Richard Kalinoski