""I'm going home," an Armenian American matriarch announces as she storms out of a reality-TV taping in Glendale, clutching her oversize purse. "To Calabasas." It's a typically sharp laugh line from the playwright Talene Monahon, delivered with the level of comedic precision that only someone like Andrea Martin could attain-she really knows how to revel in the comedy of a hard consonant-that cuts quick and cleanly, and then, like a lot of Meet the Cartozians, leaves a throbbing, unclotted wound."
"The pain all has to do with that tricky final word, "home," which recurs throughout Monahon's time-hopping drama of assimilation. In the play's second act, Martin's character, Rose, shows up to discuss her culture with other Armenians at a taping of a Christmas episode of a show that is, in all but name, Keeping Up With the Kardashians. (In the universe of the play, the reality show bears the play's title.) They bicker, of course."
"By that point in Meet the Cartozians, we've already spent an act with Martin and the rest of the cast in a different era, pondering the same questions 100 years earlier in a different register. Before she gets to the reality-TV satire, Monahon kicks off her play with a stouter, though often still bitingly funny, historical reenactment. In Portland in the early 1920s, an Armenian family, the Cartozians, meet with an American lawyer, Wallace McCamant (Will Brill),"
A two-act time-hopping drama contrasts a 1920s Portland citizenship hearing with a contemporary SoCal reality-TV satire. A patriarch named Tatos is denied citizenship, allegedly based on the color of his skin, while his brother Aram was naturalized earlier. The second act relocates to Glendale and Calabasas, where Rose, played with comedic precision by Andrea Martin, confronts questions of culture and belonging during a parody of a Kardashian-style show. The play balances sharp, laugh-out-loud lines with unsettling emotional wounds, probing whether comfort and refuge equate to true home and acceptance.
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