In 'Ironbound,' stage role comes full-circle for Chicago actress Lucy Carapetyan
Actress Lucy Carapetyan is returning to a play she’s had a long relationship with, one she can’t seem to get out of her mind — Martyna Majok’s drama “Ironbound.”
In March 2020, Carapetyan was in rehearsal for a production of “Ironbound” under the direction of Jonathan Berry at her home company, Steep Theatre. We all know what happened then.
The play was never staged due to the pandemic shutdown, and many months later as theaters began to rev up again, Steep decided not to reprogram the play. Carapetyan was “sad not to see the play to fruition.”
Berry, in the meantime, was now the artistic director of Penobscot Theatre in Bangor, Maine, where he planned a production in the spring of 2023 and invited Carapetyan to pick up where she left off — in the role of Darja, a Polish immigrant cleaning lady who is attempting to take charge of her life.
“I was so happy to get to complete the loop of having started the play with him in Chicago,” she says. “It was a beautiful production, but I just didn’t feel I was done with this play and that the play wasn’t done with me.”
Now Carapetyan is getting a chance to finally bring “Ironbound” to a Chicago audience at Raven Theatre, which has become a second artistic home for her. The production, helmed by director Georgette Verdin, also features Nate Santana, Richie Villafuerte and Glenn Obrero. (The Raven production is the play’s Chicago premiere. It previously received a developmental staging as part of Steppenwolf Theatre’s First Look Repertory of New Plays in 2014.)
After Carapetyan recounted her history with “Ironbound,” Raven’s artistic director Sarah Slight, a fan of Majok’s work, jumped at the chance to stage the play.
“Lucy is one of the most talented people I know. She is an incredibly smart actor, and her Darja is laser focused on what she needs in any given moment. She's honest, funny and not afraid to go after what she wants. I think audiences are going to be wowed by Lucy in this role.”
Carapetyan says she is compelled by “stories that center on people, especially women, who are the more invisible parts of our society” and she feels playwright Majok excels at this type of storytelling.
“Martyna writes from such a deeply personal space in this play, which is inspired in part by her mom. It allows you to see so much more of the humanity in these characters, to get to the underbelly of people’s stories that we don’t often hear about.”
Carapetyan was serious from an early age about achieving her goal of becoming a working actor.
It was the summer between kindergarten and first grade when she was cast as Molly, the youngest orphan in a production of “Annie” in her hometown, Austin, Texas.
“That was the beginning of the end for me,” Carapetyan says, laughing. “My parents were surprised as they thought this was just a summer thing. But I never looked back.”
She studied theater and dance growing up, performed around Austin as a teenager and landed at Northwestern University where she studied theater, and has since forged a steady two-decade career in Chicago.
“In a stroke of genius for an 18-year-old, when I was considering colleges, I only looked at schools in cities where I wanted to live after graduating,” she says. “I just had an instinct about Chicago, and it proved true. There’s never been a moment where I wished I was somewhere else.”
The road to a sustainable life in theater began, like many theater artists, with a long list of side jobs (answering phones at a hair salon, passing out flyers, babysitting, etc.) that over the years has morphed into theater-related jobs in addition to acting.
“I’ve been able to evolve my day jobs and bring them all closer to my artistic life,” she says. “I feel very rooted in the community.”
Carapetyan, 40, has worked steadily at dozens of area theaters, while developing her love of physical theater (aerial circus arts mastered at the Actors Gymnasium) and new play development. She is on the casting team and an intimacy director at Steep and has workshopped more than a dozen plays. Her dance and physical theater background led to a gig as a motion capture actor for the “Injustice” and “Mortal Kombat” video games.
“Motion capture is a total dream job and one of the most fun things I’ve done,” she says. “We’re in these tight cat suits with markers all over our bodies in a studio with hundreds of cameras capturing our movement from every angle.”
Carapetyan advises young theater artists to follow her lead and pursue as many interests as possible.
“Spend time getting to know the people and companies that are doing work you are excited about and find ways to be around that,” she says. “Take shifts in a box office, train as a fight choreographer. Diversify your skill set.”
Two decades in, the Chicago theater scene — from the storefronts to the larger house — still excites Carapetyan in every way.
“It just never gets old. You can never get complacent. You never hit a stride and go, ‘Oh, I’ve figured it out now.’ You just have to keep being ready to come into a space and make a new version of a working relationship with new collaborators. This theater chemistry continues to excite me every time.”