Playwright Leslie Ayvazian’s 'Another Lovely Day' Delves Into Fear and Family

When Bay Street Theater presents its 9th annual “Title Wave: 2023 New Works Festival” over the weekend of May 5 to May 7, among the four featured plays to be read is one that delves into the notion of uncertainty in chaotic times and the driving urge to keep ones loved ones safe at all costs.

Playwright Leslie Ayvazian’s “Another Lovely Day,” which kicks off the festival on Friday, May 5, at 8 p.m., is a three-character play that takes place in a suburban living room where Martin and Fran, a husband and wife portrayed by real-life married couple John Slattery and Talia Balsam (who starred in the TV series “Mad Men”), are debating current events as they relate to their 17-year-old son, Brian.

It’s the aftermath of 9/11, there’s unrest everywhere, a war going on halfway around the world, and military recruiters have been spotted at Brian’s high school. With tensions running high, Martin and Fran suddenly find themselves on opposite sides of the political spectrum when it comes to the major issues at hand, especially as it relates to their son’s future.

While the play was initially written in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 2001, Ayvazian has since updated it by referencing some of the political issues that have arisen in the years since and have only served to make this country even more divided.

“The husband spent time in the army, the son is interested in being a musician and the wife is learning about the issues and movements, like the pink pussy hats,” said Ayvazian. “The foundation of the dialogue is about trust and marriage as they are shifting over what they want for their son. I’m interested in posing questions, though it doesn’t mean I find answers.”

Ayvazian is thrilled to have John Slattery and his wife, Talia Balsam, come to Bay Street to do the reading of “Another Lovely Day.”

“I have always been a fan of John Slattery, I think he’s one of our very best actors,” said Ayvazian. “We did a reading of this play in New York City. I read the wife’s role and, John the husband’s. It was a very special time, the audience responded very fully to it. John is the one who made me respect my play, He’s a friend and we’ve been in touch, and I very much like his wife, Talia. She’s incredibly talented. When I asked them to read it to me over Zoom, the two of them got on the call so I could hear it again, and their son, Harry, was old enough to read the role of the son in the play.”

Ayvazian, who teaches playwrighting at the college level, is currently the interim head of the playwrighting concentration in the Graduate School of the Arts at Columbia University. Ironically, from her perch at Columbia in upper Manhattan, Ayvazian can almost see across the river to Leonia, New Jersey, the town where she was living with her family on 9/11, which resulted in her penning “Another Lovely Day.”

“My son, Ivan, was in the 9th grade,” she said. “My husband, Sam, was an architect in midtown and he saw one of the buildings fall and he walked home to Leonia over the George Washington Bridge.”

In fact, there were many people living in Leonia who worked in lower Manhattan at the time and Ayvazian recalls watching them return home late that day, one by one, as they walked down her street covered in ash from the collapse of the World Trade Center.

“No one made eye contact either. I had moved to the land of the zombies,” recalled Ayvazian. “It was a Tuesday and that night a number of people, mainly retired people, gathered in the park in the middle of town and stood in silence.

“We decided to do that every Tuesday for a year. Eventually, we moved to a street corner,” she continued. “I stood with these people of all denominations in every kind of weather, snow falling, stood drenched in rain, quietly standing in silence. I’m so verbal, but for me to be in silence with someone felt remarkably intimate and powerful.”

Standing with her neighbors week after week in the wake of 9/11 became the starting point for the character Fran’s experience in the play. “She talks about standing in line and how it’s affecting her spiritually, and the feeling of protection for her son,” said Ayvazian, who adds that when a military recruiter actually came to Ivan’s school, it triggered the fear and uncertainty which becomes central to the play’s theme.

“Ivan was signing a piece of paper. I didn’t know what it was, and it was about me finding a piece of myself I didn’t know I had,” she said. “At the time, my son was practicing his guitar in his room. As a backdrop to the play, I wrote his music into the script.”

Of course, we’ve had plenty more worries come along in the years since 9/11 — not only rising gun violence, wars and divisive rhetoric, but also COVID-19 and, thanks to climate change, plenty of natural disasters like earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes and wildfires.

Ironically, disasters have, in some way defined Ayvazian’s focus as a playwright and they have often been features of her work, though explored in more internal, subtle ways, such as in her one-woman play “High Dive,” where a mother is encouraged by her young son to take the plunge.

“‘High Dive’ is a play that takes place on a diving board and I’m trying to jump off,” Ayvazian explained. “Part of reason is that, for many years, anywhere I went there was a natural disaster. I created 35 roles for audience members, so when people walk in I would invite them to sit around the ‘pool’ and yell lines and I spoke back. It was a fun, active show to do. I’ve done it in Slovakia, and Poland, it’s an odd relationship to the audience that was fun.”

It also comes from a real life situation.

“My son wanted to make sure I was strong and brave. We had an experience in Athens, a chance to do the high dive, and I walked to the end of board and didn’t jump,” she said. “I told him I have different strengths, but that doesn’t translate. An only child needed to know his mom was strong.”

Another of Ayvazian’s plays, “Porcupine Girl,” is an intimate conversation that takes place between a little girl isolated in her room during a pandemic and a porcupine who is the sole animal left behind at a neighboring zoo after evacuation. Though she admits that her plays, like this one, can be somewhat experimental, the themes of family and the need for security feel quite universal. That’s definitely the case in “A Lovely Day” where a mother, father and son explore their innermost beliefs and fears in the uncertainty of those early days after 9/11. It’s an insecurity that has followed and in, many ways, has stayed with us as individuals and a nation.

“This play is my response to two things — 9/11 and the pandemic. I’m really delighted [Bay Street’s artistic director] Scott [Schwartz] is interested in this play and I’m looking forward to hearing it,” said Ayvazian. “It’s three people in a living room, that’s it. It’s the world of what was happening then. I have to say, it’s a play about, ‘Do we go to war? And what do we do now?’ That’s never not a question. I think it’s why people are now interested is Ukraine. This is what we’re looking at and what does that mean?

Though her plays take place in relatively calm settings, the bigger issues are never far beneath the surface, such as the random nature of disasters, both manmade and natural, that can destroy one family while leaving the next one totally unscathed and intact.

“Last night, I saw a documentary that made me think of God — ‘The Elephant Whisperers,’” Ayvazian said. “There are people in India who care for elephants, putting it in its room for the night, and when they talk about God it makes sense. It’s very moving, the simplicity of that. The work that goes into taking care of elephants, and then I think of my life in New York City and where’s my elephant?”

Ultimately, perhaps you could say that staying strong for family is Ayvazian’s elephant and it’s an instinct that she feels she can trace to her Armenian roots.

“I have an enormous sense of protecting those around me. My father was in Turkey at the beginning of the genocide,” she said. “In some way, you have to know that has made me fierce in terms of the protection of loved ones. I think everyone is fierce in their own ways for their own reasons.

“I’m interested in sentences that let your imagination fly into your own world,” she added. “In this play, I wanted to give just enough information for the audience to give their own sense of timing to this. It’s a delicate thing to do in a play as realistic as this one. I tried to push out of the early 2000s because things have changed so much since then and it’s closer to where we are now.

“I need to see what is it like for me to sit in the back row and listen to this.”

Bay Street Theater’s 9th annual “Title Wave: 2023 New Works Festival” runs Friday, May 5, through Sunday, May 7 with readings of four new plays, all written by women, that are currently in development. Selected from 300 submissions, the plays are: “Another Lovely Day” by Leslie Ayvazian on Friday, May 5, at 8 p.m. starring John Slattery and Talia Balsam; “Come Again” by Lisa Feriend on Saturday, May 6, at 2 p.m.; “What I Know, Now” by and starring Julia Motyka on Saturday, May 6, at 8 p.m.; and “You Have To Promise” by Audrey Lang on Sunday, May 7, at 2 p.m.

In addition to the readings, the presentation of winners of the 2023 “Writing the Wave Creative Writing Competition” will be held Sunday, May 7, at 7 p.m. Tickets for each reading are $10 with proceeds supporting New Works initiatives at Bay Street (a festival pass with tickets to all performances is $25). To purchase, visit baystreet.org or call 631-725-9500. Bay Street Theater is on Long Wharf in Sag Harbor.