Méliné Ter Minassian’s One-Woman Show ‘Mi Morna’ Draws a Full House in Paris

She explained that the play builds on an earlier phase: initially, “Mi Morna, Moranum Em” connected Western Armenian and Eastern Armenian through language and characters. The play raises one question: what do we want to pass on and what can we choose not to pass on? Ter Minassian is well aware that she is the heir to a history and at the same time the granddaughter of a contemporary Armenian historian. But for her, it was important not to remain fixated on the command “Remember!”, even though it is very widespread among Armenians.

In the show, she constantly shifts between two identities: her own and that of Anahide, her grandmother. And she explains that when she says, “Don’t forget,” it is her grandmother speaking to her, even though when she says, “I forget,” that is also part of reality. Méliné is sensitive to the fact that, toward the end of her life, her grandmother expressed a need to distance herself from the past and encouraged her granddaughter to keep moving forward. Moving yet optimistic in its own unique way, the show is permeated by the hope that future generations will not be fixated solely on a painful memory.

The Distant Experience of War

The play is set in the present, during the 2020 Artsakh War, which is evoked through news audio clips in English, French and Armenian. The audience comes to understand that the intimate experience of this distant war, lived from within the diaspora, has been, in a way, heightened by the intimate and serene experience of the actress’s pregnancy. The moment of the Artsakh War is thus evoked by this ambivalent experience: Méliné Ter Minassian is carrying a baby girl, yet she is also connected live to Stepanakert, where her father — an anesthesiologist and resuscitation specialist — has volunteered. “This dual experience — this feeling of being both there and not there — is very strong during times of war, especially for people who have lived in exile,” the actress confides.

But the project in its current form is also linked to the death of Méliné’s grandmother “on a cold night at the end of winter” in February 2019. Thus, the “Mi Morna” project, which began in 2015, went through various stages before taking its current form.

While the play brings together three generations of female ancestors, Méliné confided that she has actually slipped into the childhood memories of her grandmother, Anahide Ter Minassian. The initial starting point for the show in 2015 was more of a reflection on the figure of the ghost, specifically, that of her great-great-grandmother, Gülizar, whose lore is still passed down orally in certain regions of historic Armenia, particularly among Kurdish populations. This discovery fueled Méliné’s reflection on the way in which the dead continue to inhabit our bodies, our stories and our voices. For the actress, the theater is precisely the place where these presences can be summoned.