Adriana Sevan

Adriana Sevahn Nichols, a native New Yorker, of Armenian, Dominican, and Basque heritage, is an award winning actress and playwright. Her solo show, Taking Flight, which premiered at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, was named “one of the 10 best plays of the year,” winning a San Diego Theatre Critics Circle Award, a Los Angeles Women’s Theatre Festival Award, and the audio CD, produced by LATW, for the Public Radio series, “The Play’s The Thing,” was a finalist for an Audie Award.

As a playwright, Adriana has created, developed, and performed her work at the Sundance Theater Lab, South Coast Repertory, Mark Taper Writers Lab, Goodman Theatre, LA Theatre Works, Stages Theatre, The Fountain Theatre, Golden Thread, Silk Road Rising, INTAR, Dixon Place NY, and The Lark. Her work has been...

Adriana Sevahn Nichols, a native New Yorker, of Armenian, Dominican, and Basque heritage, is an award winning actress and playwright. Her solo show, Taking Flight, which premiered at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, was named “one of the 10 best plays of the year,” winning a San Diego Theatre Critics Circle Award, a Los Angeles Women’s Theatre Festival Award, and the audio CD, produced by LATW, for the Public Radio series, “The Play’s The Thing,” was a finalist for an Audie Award.

As a playwright, Adriana has created, developed, and performed her work at the Sundance Theater Lab, South Coast Repertory, Mark Taper Writers Lab, Goodman Theatre, LA Theatre Works, Stages Theatre, The Fountain Theatre, Golden Thread, Silk Road Rising, INTAR, Dixon Place NY, and The Lark. Her work has been published by Samuel French, Northwestern Press, Smith & Kraus and Routledge Press. Her essays have been published in American Theatre magazine. She was the recipient of the very first Middle East America Distinguished Playwright Award, which gifted her with a commission to write a play, inspired by her Armenian grandparent’s survival of the Genocide, of 1915. Night Over Erzinga, has had critically acclaimed productions at Silk Road Rising (Chicago), and Golden Thread Productions (San Francisco), and a BareBones at the Lark Play Development Center (New York). Night Over Erzinga, was also translated into Armenian and premiered at, Yerevan State Youth Theatre, April 2015, in honor of the 100 year anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. She was chosen as one of twelve playwrights for the inaugural Fornes Writer’s Intensive, taught by Migdalia Cruz, at Notre Dame University. Adriana is currently at work on a collection of short stories called, The Curandera’s Grand Daughter, and a new solo performance piece.

As an actress, Adriana has appeared in multiple guest-starring roles on tv which include: Law & Order, The Unit, Sex & The City, Deadline, Dellaventura, and Law & Order: Criminal Intent. She played a leading role in the feature film, Harvest, with Barbara Barrie, Robert Loggia, and Arye Gross. Onstage Off B’way & Regional credits include: The Children (Boston Court), Taking Flight (Kirk Douglas Theatre, San Diego Rep, Fountain Theatre, Goodman, Teatro Vision), Boleros for the Disenchanted (Yale Repertory), The Clean House, Caucasian Chalk Circle (South Coast Repertory), Anna in the Tropics (South Coast Repertory, Coconut Grove Playhouse, LA Theatre Works), Two Sisters and a Piano (The Public Theater, South Coast Rep), Our Lady Of 121St (LA Theater Works), Derek Walcott’s The Odyssey (Willow Cabin Theater Co.), Indian Ink(ACT), Another Part of the House (Classic Stage Co.), Henry V (Shakespeare & Co.), and Macbeth (HERE) King Lear (Tour, opp Kristin Linklater as Lear.)

Adriana has taught Theatre nationally and internationally. For the past three years, as a professor at USPA’s, Summer Acting Conservatory, at UCLA, and at the Goodman Theatre, Relativity School, ORRAN center for at risk youth in Yerevan, Armenia, CalArts, TEADA, and UCSB. She is an Approved Eponaquest Equine Facilitated Learning instructor and has most recently presented her transformational work with humans and horses at the International Equine Summit, where Temple Grandin was the Keynote Speaker.

Scripts

NIGHT OVER ERZINGA

by Adriana Sevan

Synopsis

The moving story of how the Armenian Genocide impacted three generations of an immigrant family of Armenian and Dominican heritage. The play explores how a man can lose everything but his heart, and how a grandmother can reach through time, to unearth the untold story, and bring her children “home.” Spanning two continents and three generations, from Western Armenia of 1913, to 1930’s Massachusetts, to 1960’s...

The moving story of how the Armenian Genocide impacted three generations of an immigrant family of Armenian and Dominican heritage. The play explores how a man can lose everything but his heart, and how a grandmother can reach through time, to unearth the untold story, and bring her children “home.” Spanning two continents and three generations, from Western Armenia of 1913, to 1930’s Massachusetts, to 1960’s New York, ancestors are reunited with the living, as they each search for solace, and a way to make peace with the past.

In director Lisa Portes' beautifully crafted production, it's a rich, tensile and — given the grim back story — surprisingly funny multigenerational picture of what happens when people survive the unimaginable, only to find themselves utterly lost in a new world and at emotional odds with the people who are supposed to love and understand them the best. What Nichols teases out in many engaging ways is the question of how we use our dreams and our memories to sustain us — even when it would seem easier or even more salutary to forget both.

Kerry Reid/Chicago Tribune