Not on time. Armenian theatrical spectacles almost never start on time, and this familiar delay was the first thing to set the tone for the Nov. 22 performance of “Aunt From Paris,” a musical comedy that has held stages in Armenia and abroad for 15 years.
Before a nearly full audience at Bohem Theater, the performance began before the plot did. At 7:10 p.m., Narek Duryan — the adapter and star of the show — entered from a side door and called his cast to the stage. He pointed out their faults one by one: one was still checking his phone, another hadn’t finished dressing, a third was late. It set an early tone of half-rehearsal, half-performance — a mix that would become the evening’s most distinguishing feature.
Duryan asked the audience to turn off their phones, noting that he had never had a performance without at least one ringtone interruption. When a phone eventually rang, he paused, smiled and said, “See?” The audience broke into laughter and applause, as though grateful for the confirmation of a national tradition as a built-in piece of the farce.
About 10 minutes into the show, a group of latecomers arrived — another common pattern of Yerevan theatergoing. As they tried to find their seats, a friend in the row waved to guide them. Duryan, mid-scene, caught the gesture. “Are you greeting me?” he asked, his tone naive enough to spark laughter across the hall. Then, turning to the newcomers with an easy politeness, Duryan added, “Is it all right if we don’t start from the beginning?”
These moments slid naturally into the performance. Under Duryan’s lead, the play absorbed the habits of its audience, integrating them naturally into the story.
Though inspired by Brandon Thomas’ classic farce “Charley’s Aunt,” Duryan’s adaptation has evolved into something unmistakably Armenian. At its core is the constant push-and-pull between local and diaspora Armenians.
The locals chase European dreams, with many young people imagining a life built around travel, comfort and the promise of elsewhere. The diasporans, meanwhile, push back against the role of wealthy patrons, patriotic speeches, emotional appeals and stories of hardship meant to loosen their wallets.
The plot follows young Samvel, who loves Katya, and his friend Manvel, who loves Katya’s sister, Natasha. Their plans are blocked by the girls’ father, Lendrush — a decorated Soviet holdover with medals, paperwork and Bolshevik diction — who opposes all of it. The two young men have suffered six years of unfulfilled admiration.
Salvation arrives in the form of a lie: Manvel claims his millionaire aunt, Bulbukyan, is flying in from Paris to bequeath him her fortune. With the girls already invited and expectations high, the boys turn to Gegham — Samvel’s actor uncle — dress him in Manvel’s mother’s designer clothes and present him as “the aunt from Paris.”
This is where the show finds its comic heat. Duryan, as Gegham-turned-Geghamouhi, totters in a red, Queen-Elizabeth-inspired suit, complete with hat, heels and fan. Guests shower “her” with alphabet-themed souvenirs and patriotic poems, insisting on teaching her Armenian letters as if she has never known them.
As Gegham grows more comfortable in the disguise, the performance shifts into full farce. Playing the millionaire aunt with an exaggerated diasporan accent, he openly flirts with the young women. At the same time, both Samvel’s father, Monsieur Jacques, and Lendrush — encouraged by their children — take turns trying to charm the “aunt,” each seeing marriage as a shortcut to comfort.
A scene built around the meaning of the Armenian letter “S” — moving from “sirt,” or heart, to “ser,” or love, then to “sex,” and finally to an obscene S-word meaning “get lost” — earned some of the biggest laughs of the night.
By the time Lendrush laid out a notarized approval of his daughters’ marriages, in pursuit of the “aunt’s” hand, Gegham could no longer pretend. He confessed, instantly becoming the target of everyone’s frustration. Then came the final twist: a call from the airport announcing that the real Madame Bulbukyan had landed. The cast rushed offstage to welcome her.
At the end, Duryan stepped out of the story once again and addressed the audience directly, asking how they would finish the play and admitting that, even after 15 years, he has never quite found an ending.
He began a monologue about Armenia–diaspora relations and the tendency of those abroad to advise and dictate how life in Armenia should be lived. But before he could finish, one of the actresses interrupted to announce that her relative had just arrived from Los Angeles. Once again, they dropped everything and rushed off, ending the night in the same playfulness.
The cast — Duryan, Sergey Voskanyan, Armen Karapetyan, Siranush Yerikyan, Arminka Hovsepyan, Telman Arakelyan and Artak Manukyan — played with confidence, though the musical part, performed on prerecorded tracks, didn’t have the liveliness to match their energy.
After 15 years onstage, much of the humor inevitably has shown its age. Many of the jokes belonged to the late 1990s and early 2000s. Nowhere was this clearer than in the character of Lendrush, once a sharp caricature of a post-Soviet man who no longer feels like a living archetype.
Yet, the audience laughed, and the evening turned into a small portrait of Armenian public life: warm, unorganized, persistently late, and engaged — even after the 507th run.