BOSTON — Award-winning playwright Barbara Bejoian probed Armenian-American customs and traditions, exploring, shifting relations between family and friends and adjustments to rapid changes in the modern world, during her successful career cut short by her death from cancer in 2004.
In a tribute to her talent and achievements, two of her best known plays, “The Porch” and “Dance, Mama, Dance,” will be featured in a program “Barbara + 2,” a staged reading on Sunday, November 7, at the Armenian Cultural Foundation in Arlington.
“The Porch” (1999) takes place in the Berkshires and Boston and is subtitled “An Old-Fashioned Play with a New-Fashioned Ending.” It deals with family/friend relationships and reflects Bejoian’s love for baseball, Fenway Park and the Boston Red Sox. It received the first prize at the Sewanee Writers Conference in 2001.
“Dance, Mama, Dance” was commissioned by the Rites and Reason Theatre at Brown University, where it was first performed in 1984 and later revised and produced there in 1989 with the support of a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. One of a trilogy of Bejoian plays centered on defining the Armenian-American women of the 20th century, it explores political, religious, and social tensions arising as the past of a multi-generational Armenian-American family is unraveled.
Widely recognized as a playwright, Bejoian was also an outstanding educator, teaching English, playwriting, and creative writing to a variety of students in many settings, ranging from elementary school children whose second language was English to undergraduate and graduate students at several universities, including Brown, New York University, Rhode Island School of Design, and the University of Rhode Island. She received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as ten Massachusetts Artist-in-Residence Awards for her work with elementary school children.
Born in Watertown in 1955, Bejoian graduated from Watertown High School and Wheaton College, and after participating in writing seminars at Radcliffe College and serving as a summer intern in documentary writing at the BBC (British Broadcasting Company) in London, she earned her Master of Arts Degree in Creative Writing from Brown University. Subsequently she collaborated for several years with the director of Brown’s Rites and Reason Theatre George Houston Bass while teaching at Brown.
