Review of: Beast On the Moon

Richard Kalinoski's Beast on the Moon is a by-the-numbers play that is ultimately moving because the subject matter concerns the atrocities suffered by Armenians at the hands of Turks during the first years of the 20th century. Mr. Kalinoski very slowly allows you to become invested in the two main characters before their horrific tragedies erupt from them in emotional outpourings designed to make audiences feel like they're engaged in great theatre. What is unfortunate in this design is that like a roller-coaster, it's a painstaking, uphill climb before the rush of adrenalin sends you crashing headlong into what you know has been coming all along.

In a long first scene, a young Armenian (Omar Metwally) whose trade is photography has ordered his 15 year-old Armenian bride (Lena Georgas) from a brochure of survival victims' pictures and they arrive in Minnesota to set up house. That she is not who he thought is an indication of the chaos reigning in Armenia itself. The play moves forward through time where we discover that he, in a symbolic gesture to his murdered parents and siblings, has cut out the heads of a family portrait so that they can be replaced by the new family he intends to produce, and that due to her starvation she is most likely barren; that he is a religious man who quotes bible passages that suit his particular arguments of the day, and that in her common- sensical way she has a talent for making friends, selling her own baked goods and giving kindnesses to street orphans. And one particular orphan that they both eventually take to, we learn is our narrator - now an old man.

Mr. Metwally and Ms. Georgas, both fine actors who deliver the final emotional goods in a flood of raw anguish, take on many of the scenes, especially the earlier ones, as if they were acting exercises - not surprisingly since the director Larry Moss is an acting teacher. There is actor tension as opposed to character tension through much of the first act that only dissolves as the couple ages - something the actors do convincingly. Mr. Moss should have also found a less obtrusive way of using Louis Zorich as the orphan's aged self looking back on the events (some of which he would never have seen). One almost expected the other actors to say "excuse me" to him as they moved around him.

The script also feels like an exercise as though Mr. Kalinoski took out a diagram and said to himself I will slowly build this duo into at-long-last loving couple from their awkward first encounter through their arguments (some religious), to their successes, disappointments, and revelations while mixing in obvious metaphors and symbols (a security blanket doll, a dead father's coat, not to mention the family photograph ironically altered by a photographer of families). That the end of the play works is a testament to such a diagram but more so of course to the outrage one feels about genocide. It feels manipulative and therefore diminishes its impact. But impact it has nonetheless.

end...