Death of Armen Armenian (July 20, 1965)

There was a constellation of names in the history of the Armenian theater at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, and Armen Armenian was one of the stars of that constellation.

Armen Ipekian, his actual name, was the elder brother of Kaspar Ipekian (1883-1952), who would also become an important figure of Armenian theater and public life in the Diaspora. He was born in Constantinople, where he received his education, on September 10, 1871. He apparently jumped from one school to the other: from the Armenian elementary school in the neighborhood of Pera (Beyoglu) he went to a German school in the same area, then became a boarding student of the Mekhitarist Congregation in Kadikeuy, a student of the school of Ortakeuy, and finally, he graduated from the newly open Central (Getronagan) School.

Newly graduated, he was mesmerized by the great actor Bedros Atamian in 1889-1890, and deeply impacted by his death in 1891. He had to fight against the wishes of his family, which opposed to his theatrical interests, and finally had their consent to perform on the condition of never using the family name. This is how Armen Armenian was born. His first role was in Alexandre Dumas’ “The Dame of the Camellias.

His father wanted him to become a merchant, and sent him to Hamburg, in Germany, in 1894. While taking care of family business, he also watched Eleonora Duse and later, during a trip to Brussels, Sarah Bernhardt’s play. He got in touch with the “divine Sarah” and asked for her assistance. Later, he moved to Paris and entered Sarah Bernhardt theater, where he performed silent roles and became the assistant to the technical director, while following the art of Bernhardt, Mounet-Sully and his younger brother Paul Mounet, and others. He learned theatrical speech and the art of classical tragedy and comedy at Paul Mounet’s private studio in 1895-1897. He later performed at the Bouffes du Nord theater and at the Comedie Francaise.

In 1902 he was invited to Tiflis, where he performed and directed French plays, and then went to Baku as director and actor of the local Armenian theater group. In 1904 he moved to Nor Nakhichevan and formed a theater group, with which he toured the Armenian communities of Northern Caucasus and Russia

By 1908 Armenian had become a well-known director and actor, and joined forces with another recognized colleague, Hovhannes Abelian, to form the “Abelian-Armenian” theater group, which was particularly successful during its five-year run, with Abelian as the spirit of the group and Armenian as the director, with lengthy presentations in the Ottoman Empire, the Caucasus, and Russia. Armenian, who was the first director to stage Levon Shant’s famous play, “Ancient Gods,” was also an accomplished actor in the roles of Yago and Shylock (Shakespeare’s “Othello” and “The Merchant of Venice”), Franz (Friedrich Schiller’s “The Brigands”), Harpagon (Moliere’s “The Imaginary Invalid”), and others.

Armenian continued his theatrical activities in the Caucasus from 1914-1917, and went to Iran from 1917-1921. He returned to the Soviet Union in 1921, and worked in the Northern Caucasus, Baku, Tiflis, Alexandropol (nowadays Gyumri), and other places. He was the director of theaters in Alexandropol and Sukhumi, on the Black Sea shore. From 1935 he worked at the State Theater of Leninakan (Gyumri’s name from 1924-1991), and received the title of Popular Artist of Soviet Armenia in the same year. He staged a total of more than 100 plays in his life, and played about 150 roles. In 1954 he published his memoirs, entitled Sixty Years on the Armenian Stage.

Armen Armenian passed away at the age of ninety-three, on July 20, 1965, in Leninakan.

Death of Hovhannes Abelian - July 1, 1936

The three Abelian brothers, originally from Shamakha (current Azerbaijan), became noteworthy personalities in different aspects of Armenian culture and history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The elder brother, Nerses (1855-1933), an engineer by trade, was among the students who founded the Union of Patriots (1882) in Moscow, one of the first Armenian political groups in the Russian Empire. The middle brother, Alexander (1858-1940), was a prolific playwright, and the younger one, Hovhannes, turned to be one of the stars of Armenian theater for more than fifty years.

Hovhannes Abelian was born in 1865 in Shamakha. After the violent earthquake of 1872, most of the Armenian population of the city started to move to Baku, which was coincidental to the development of this city as a world-known oil center. The young Hovhannes gave his first steps on the stage in 1882, in a Russian group. He moved to Tiflis (Tbilisi), the main Armenian cultural center of the Caucasus, in 1886 and entered the playgroup of the Armenian Dramatic Club. He lived and played between Tiflis and Baku for the next two decades, and became an unsurpassed interpreter of the works of famous playwright Shirvanzade (Alexander Movsisian, 1858-1935), who incidentally was his cousin. He played some 300 roles in his long career, including plays by Gabriel Sundukian, Levon Shant, and Hagop Baronian, but also works by Russian and European playwrights, from Nikolai Gogol to William Shakespeare.

In 1908 Abelian joined forces with another famous Armenian actor, Armen Armenian (1871-1965), brother of theater director and playwright Kaspar Ipekian (the founder of the Hamazkayin theater group in Lebanon, 1883-1952). The Abelian-Armenian Theater Group, with several very important names in the cast, started a three-year long tour of Armenian cities and communities in Eastern Armenia, the Caucasus, Western Armenia, Iran, and Turkey. In 1909 it went to Constantinople and another famous actor, Hovhannes Zarifian (1879-1936), joined them. After several performances in the Ottoman capital, following the cultural revival brought by the restoration of the Ottoman Constitution in 1908, the Abelian-Armenian-Zarifian Theater Group divided into three branches, which performed in Smyrna (Izmir), Anatolia, and the third one, led by Abelian and Zarifian, in Izmit, Bardizag, Adapazar, Eskishehir, and Rodosto (Tekirdag). They ended their run in 1911, with performances in Baku, Nor Nakhichevan, and Moscow.

During the 1910s, Abelian—who was equally qualified to play in Armenian and Russian productions—continued his professional activities and performed in the Caucasus, but also in Moscow and Petersburg, as well as Iran and Central Asia. He left the Caucasus in September 1920 and moved abroad with his family. For the next three years, he performed in Constantinople, Smyrna, Cairo, Alexandria, Berlin, (where he played “Othello” with a German group, performing his signature role of Othello in Armenian), Paris, Brussels, and London. He arrived in the United States in 1923 and performed in many communities on the East Coast and the Midwest (New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Chicago) for the next two years.

However, Abelian’s aim was not to stay abroad. In 1925 he accepted an invitation of the government of Soviet Armenia and settled in Yerevan. He was conferred with the title of Popular Artist of the Republic in 1925 and entered the First Theater (now the Sundukian Theater). He would continue to play with the same enthusiasm and talent of his younger years until his death on the stage, in Yerevan, at the age of 71. The dramatic theater of Vanadzor, the third city of Armenia, bears his name.