Dreams on Fire sheds light on epigenetics, collective trauma of genocide traveling through generations

NEW YORK, NY — Set before the 2016 presidential elections, Dreams on Fire, a groundbreaking play by Professor Jan Balakian and directed by Nora Armani, explores college students, mental health and the transmission of trauma in history across generations via the Armenian Genocide.

The play traces back the causes of Aram Sarkissian’s anxiety and mental health issues to intergenerational trauma through epigenetics. While the subject is dark, the characters are full of life and humor. The story takes place in Fort Lee, NJ and in retrospect prophetically refers to the four years of disastrous leadership that await the US. Aram’s grandmother Hripsime recounts the experiences of her own mother, surviving the Genocide as a young woman, and how she ends up in the US.

The riveting tale links the past to the present and explains mental health today as it is traced back to past trauma, even if such trauma has not touched the victim directly. Never before has there been a play that explores college students, mental health and the Armenian Genocide within the context of the 2016 election.

The cast of the Zoom reading includes Constance Cooper, Sam Arthur, Emma Giorgio and Dalita Getzoyan. Donna Heffernan is assistant director. The reading, which is open to the public, will take place on Wednesday, April 27, at 5:00 PM EDT presented as part of the Kean University Research Day activities. A Q&A session with Balakian, faculty members and attendees will follow the reading. FREE and open to the public.

The Armenian Genocide perpetrated by Ottoman Turkey on the Armenians is a fact widely substantiated by historians, archivists and eyewitnesses whose accounts have been recorded and preserved. And yet, the countries who have officially recognized it are few, mainly to appease Turkey.

US presidents, under pressure from Turkey, have played word gymnastics calling the events by several different names, shying away from its correct name of Genocide. President Joe Biden acknowledged the Armenian Genocide in 2021, and this year, on the 107th anniversary of the commemoration, confirmed that the events that started on April 24, 1915 and lasted until 1923, were in fact Genocide, causing the death of over 1.5 million Armenians and wiping out an entire population from its ancestral lands.