Found

By Anoush Baghdassarian

Found is a play about a young girl named Lucine and her experience through the Armenian Genocide. Lucine, watching in a state of frozen panic from her bedroom door, witnesses her parents being killed at the hands of the Turks. While this is happening, her younger brother Raffi runs out of the house and is chased by the Turkish soldiers. This gives Lucine time to escape. Although Lucine knows that her parents were killed, she still has hope that her brother is alive somewhere, and she uses the next ten years of her life to search for him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 26, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499069587

Anoush Baghdassarian

Anoush Baghdassarian was a senior in high school—age 17—when she wrote this play from late October 2012-January 2013. Since the sixth grade she has always felt it her obligation to inform people of her family’s history. She had learned of this genocide as “the forgotten genocide” and made it her goal to help change that. She believed that through learning about the past, we could prevent history from repeating itself and this sparked her desire to act upon her beliefs. Anoush Baghdassarian attends Claremont Mckenna College and is planning to dual major with literature and psychology, with a minor in human rights. She is from Great Neck, New York and is the oldest of four--Anoush (18), Sophie (17), Aram (14), and Antranig (8). Anoush's mother was born in Montevideo, Uruguay and her father in Bayside, New York, yet both of them are Armenian. Growing up, Anoush would be asked, like every other child, what nationality she is. She knew her grandfather was born in Egypt, her grandmother in Greece, and her mother in South America, so she would say, "Egyptian and Greek and Uruguayan and Armenian." When people would ask her how she was so eclectic, she would always resort to the explanation of the Armenia Genocide--"Well, after the Genocide my family escaped to all these different places and started new lives there, so technically, I am fully Armenian." This explanation became so ingrained in who she is that she began to identify with being Armenian more than anything else.

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Copyright © 2014 by Anoush Baghdassarian.

Attribution: CC BY - SA 3.0 (Map)

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Rev. date: 09/25/2014

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Contents

Dedication

Historical Introduction

About the Playwright

Original Cast

Second Cast

Staging/Props

Character Descriptions

Synopsis

Found

Alternate/Original Ending

Reviews

Dedication

To my grandmother (mamma) Antaram Aharonian, for being so knowledgeable and being an inspiration for me to fight at great lengths for our right to be remembered. I hope I can follow in your footsteps and be as disciplined and diligent as you are with this topic.

To my mother for always encouraging me to write and put my thoughts down on paper because you always believed I had great talent. No matter how trivial my work was, you always admired it and held it on such high pedestals. You always tell me to write and promise that if I just do it, you will handle the publishing. Well now we’ve done it—together. Thank you.

To my father for always saying yes. You have presented me with a world of opportunities with that simple three-letter word. You want me to have the best and you work day and night to provide my three siblings and me with everything. Thank you for giving me the freedom to pursue everything—for if you hadn’t, perhaps I would have never stumbled upon writing. Also, thank you for making the church such an important figure in my life. Had I not gone to Sunday school and had you not been so enthusiastic about God and his teachings, I wouldn’t have loved, or even known, my history and culture the way I do now.

Historical Introduction

Armenia is a small country situated in the Northeast of Asia Minor, bounded by the Caucasian mountains to its north, the Taurus Mountains to its south, Iran to its east and the Euphrates River to its west. In 301 A.D, the Armenians were the first people in the world to adopt Christianity as an official religion. This change would lead to trouble for centuries to come. Armenians found themselves both threatened by expanding Muslim empires and caught in the cross-fire of warring Turks and Persians. In the beginning of the 11th century the Turks invaded Armenia for the first time and this began hundreds of years under the rule of Muslim Turks. Armenia was now a part of the Ottoman Empire, which also included much of Southeast Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Since 1639, the Armenian territories were divided among Turkey and Persia, and the Armenian population suffered tragic consequences.

The rise of Muscovy, and the tsarist empire, an Orthodox Christian monarchy, provided Armenians with a ally in the region, but this geopolitical situation was also complicated because it placed the Armenian minority in a vulnerable position. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the continual warfare between Russia and Turkey, culminating in the Great War, was a factor that ultimately led to the genocide of the Armenians.

At first, the Armenians collaborated with Russia in their war against Persia with the hope of saving themselves from these Muslim repressive authorities. In 1818 Russia obtained the northeast region of Armenia and with the help of Armenian volunteers, Russia triumphed against the Turks. But under the pressures of the British, who also had their own interests in the region, the Russians retired from the territories they had conquered from the Turks. Many Armenians emigrated from the zones that Russia abandoned, fearing the Turks’ future actions/revenge. Their fears were warranted because in 1850 and again in 1877 Turks massacred thousands of Armenians.

The Russian-Turkish war in 1878 brought new hope for the Armenians. As the Ottoman Empire receded from Europe, western regions took the opportunity to free themselves. The Greeks, Serbs and Romanians were successful, yet the Armenians and the Arabs of the Middle East were left under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. Armenian generals and officials sided with the Russian army with the hope that the tsar would help them oust the Turks and achieve autonomy. But that liberation of a great part of Armenia that was dominated by the Turks did not occur. The Great Powers did not support Armenian independence.