About the Play

Sam Vardanyan is about to learn how much a genocide is worth on the art market. The one painting this wealthy Armenian-American art dealer won’t sell is a piece by his late wife. And selling to a Turkish buyer would be unthinkable, given that nation’s denial of atrocities against his people a century ago. It’s a slow drip of lies that Sam and others have endured for decades.

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But Ziska Koslov, a newly divorced Turkish-Russian oligarch, wants the painting anyway. Sam names his price: an apology for a massacre she had nothing to do with. It’s a head-scratching deal point for Ziska. She does have some leverage thanks to Justin Bell, her art advisor quietly building a case that Sam himself is a racist and hypocrite.

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Justin has history with Sam, who was the dealer for Justin’s older brother, Isaac Bell, a landscape painter on the edge of artworld stardom. Isaac walked away, disillusioned by Sam’s tactics. So Justin has come to support Ziska, and to test his own suspicion that Sam pays black artists less than white ones of equal stature. As the negotiation over the painting escalates, Sam’s carefully maintained image as an enlightened ally and victim begins to buckle.

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The play doubles its cast across time. Ziska transforms into Carey Nash, Sam’s late wife, an American painter who meets her own illness and her husband’s baggage with the same dry wit. In flashback, Carey believes that she and Sam might still build a family together. But Sam’s demons have a name and a face: his father, Narek, whose racism Sam insists he doesn’t share, even as he absorbed much of his father’s grief over the genocide. By the end, Sam actually becomes his father, retelling a story that he was told much too young. The character change reveals what it costs a child to inherit horror before he has the words for it.

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Infidel asks whether suffering makes us better people or simply better at hiding from ourselves. And whether understanding injustice firsthand guarantees we’ll never cross that same line.