Atrocities past, hope for future

In a long and exemplary stage career, Kathleen Chalfant is giving one of her most shattering performances at the El Portal in North Hollywood. Audiences beware: It's a harrowing experience, not for the faint of heart. Few actresses would be as courageous -- never mind capable -- of traversing this particular moral abyss. But then her searing work in "Angels in America" and "Wit," along with decades of infusing combustible human truth into classics, couldn't have prepared her better for the challenge.

The play, Alexander Dinelaris' "Red Dog Howls," had its world premiere Monday in a production sharply directed by Michael Peretzian. The story concerns the legacy of the Armenian genocide on a troubled thirtysomething New York writer who's haunted by psychological ghosts he wants to banish before his first child is born. But to get to a place of light, he must tunnel into a pit of darkness that threatens to swallow his identity, his marriage and even his unborn baby.

Addressing us directly, Michael (Matthew Rauch) explains that after his father died, he found a stash of his letters. A note instructing him to burn them is heeded, but not before he jots down the address of the sender. This clue leads him to a 91-year-old woman, who turns out to be his grandmother -- and the one person who can tell him why his beloved father and grandfather lived under such a pall.

But answers to agonizing questions do not come easily, and Dinelaris has written the play as though it were a detective novel, with Michael leading the investigation, Oedipus-like, into his mysteriously besieged soul. One can't help thinking of the Greeks, even though this isn't a tragedy but a tale of redemptive survival. The catastrophe lurks in the past, not the future, but the events described rival the horror of the House of Atreus, Agamemnon's blood-soaked clan who similarly understood a traumatic history as a hereditary curse.

Michael, who has only the sketchiest sense of his background, doesn't want the misery confounding him to be passed down. He's afraid of losing his wife, Gabriella (Darcie Siciliano), and ominously reflects on the way the wives of his grandfather and father vanished from their lives. "It was, for lack of a more exact term, a plague on our family," he says.