The conflict between Armenians and Azerbaijanis was "staged" in San Francisco

PanARMENIAN.Net - A play about the conflict between Armenians and Azerbaijanis is getting its West Coast premiere at Thick House in San Francisco, presented by Golden Thread, a company that specializes in contemporary plays telling Middle Eastern stories. The play is representing a story of a New York high fashion model, who returns home to war-torn Armenia after a 15-year absence. She finds herself arguing politics and feminist culture with her gun-toting guerilla mother, and falls in love with a boy from the wrong side of the tracks in an ethnically polarized war zone. All this happens in "A Girl's War" by Stanford alumna Joyce Van Dyke, Palo Alto Daily News reports.



Playwright Van Dyke grew up in Orinda, with maternal grandparents of Armenian descent. To date she has written five plays that have been produced, of which "A Girl's War" is the second.



As it is mentioned in the article, some of what's interesting about "A Girl's War" is putting two survivor women, a mother (Bella Warda) and daughter (Ana Bayat), at the center of a story about war, in which the fighting continues to rage. One woman is militant. The other is apathetic. As individuals, neither is in a position to exercise much self-determination in this world of violence and chaos. Both, however, are faced with moral choices. The play poses the question, to what extent is are such moral choices important in a war zone?



In director Torange Yehiazarian's production, the actors struggle to translate that data and information into believable and sympathetic relationships. The production feels disconnected.



The conflict between Armenians and Azerbaijanis covered in this play is a complex political story.



"A Girl's War" was first staged in Boston in 2001, where it won an award from the Boston Globe as one of the year's 10 best plays.