This Is Who We Are: Leslie Ayvazian

This Is Who We Are is a series featuring Columbia University School of the Arts’ professors, covering careers, pedagogy, and art-making. Here, we talk with Professor Leslie Ayvazian about adversity in art, the fallacy of thoroughbreds, and the things we stand up for. 

Associate Professor of Professional Practice and Interim Chair of the Playwriting concentration Leslie Ayvazian is a believer in the power of the written word.

“Writing was something that was sort of the culture in the family,” she recalled. As an Armenian family escaping genocide, it was a generational talent borne in part of necessity. 

“My grandparents were there in Turkey, at the time of the 1915 genocide,” said Ayvazian, recalling how her grandfather was forced to serve in the Turkish army before securing passage to the US. 

“The family came to America and lived in a kind of quietness and separateness,” said Ayvazian. After arriving in New York City, her grandfather became a minister, where his words would offer both a profession and a solace. “It was one way of staying in an Armenian community,” she said, “and healing.” Her father would continue the tradition, writing books under a pen name in addition to his medical practice.  

For Ayvazian, the role of craft in this healing was evident. “I respected the fact that the written word had some power, if for no other reason than self recognition and self care.” 

A staple of Columbia’s Theatre Program for 25 years with a focus on playwriting, Ayvazian’s writing practice is as natural (and essential) as breathing air, and one she’s been building since childhood.

“I've always done writing groups, even as a little girl. I got people together to just write together.” Over the years, this has taken several forms, from working with kids to the elderly, in nursing homes, as a VISTA volunteer, with playwrights, dramaturgs, and all-women’s groups, and even some all-men’s groups – “All the women sent me their husbands and sons."

“I do love being in the midst of process,” she said. “Watching people find themselves in their writing is a very interesting thing to do. It's a sweet thing to do,” said Ayvazian. “I just try to open the door to people for them to tumble into their imagination and break a few rules.”

Ayvazian’s pedagogy is one of exploration, a from-the-gut bravura that lets the work do the talking. “I encourage people to write into mess and into illogic, and see what's behind that,” she said. In her classroom, feedback is open and honest, and never final, “I'm not afraid to state my opinion,” she said, “and I claim it as an opinion.”

Accordingly, Ayvazian is also quick to champion the diverse roles and methods of her fellow faculty members, seeing herself as a piece in a larger puzzle. “I’m part of a team of teachers who teach very particular things, very well,” she said.

It’s a regard that readily carries over to her fellow practitioners and students, and she finds vindication in the quality of the work around her. “I just really respect playwrights. I think it's a ridiculous job. There is absolutely no guarantee, but look at the faculty. Look at the people who are around this school.”

A multi-hyphenate with a background in acting, Ayvazian also encourages a healthy dose of cross-pollination. “I think that artists have the capacity to do a lot of things. I think that actors can write. I think writers can act. I think directors can design sets,” she said. “Let's not be thoroughbreads. Let's just be mutts running around.”

Ayvazian sees this spirit of collaboration, always important in theatre, as a key tenet of the program. “I think the great value of going to graduate school is to find a team to work with and stretch yourself,” she said. “Recognize how good you are and go for it, even if it doesn't come as easily as you would like.”

Calls for courage from a celebrated playwright with a formidable teaching practice may seem easy to dismiss, but Ayvazian is no stranger to the struggles of the working artist, and knows full well what it means to be down, but not out.

Hers was a career that didn’t start on the page, and for a while, everything was going fine. “I became an actress,” she said. “I did just well enough to stay at it, a modest career; but I worked and I loved it.

“And then I had a child and I did not want to be away from home doing 8 shows a week,” she said. “So I switched off of that and I wrote my first play, which was Nine Armenians, and it was about my family.” 

If the change in vocations felt sudden, even for the daughter and granddaughter of wordsmiths, so too did its success. “I won awards, I made money, I bought two BMWs (second hand),” said Ayvazian. Five separate commissions followed in short order, and the only thing Ayvazian needed to decide was what to write next.

“I'd written my family story, and the next story I wrote was nothing like that.” The new project told the story of a nightgown-wearing woman sitting on a rooftop singing to her dearly departed lover, and it was off to an auspicious start. The play was accepted even before Ayvazian had written the ending, a “huge production” complete with rotating house and ivy growing up the side.  

There was only one problem. “I couldn't finish it. I didn't know how it ended,” said Ayvazian, “and I lost the play.” The fallout was immediate, with Ayvazian losing all five of her commissions. “The reviews were so bad. People walked out. So I went high and low within a year.” She returned to acting.

Ayvazian is able to recall this shocking turn of events with the steadfast candor of one who’s been shown the door, only to be welcomed back. Her return as a playwright would manifest a few years later, at a hotel pool in Greece, when her young son became enamored with the high dive.

“He would jump off it, and then it became important to him that I jump off it,” said Ayvazian. “I'm afraid of heights. So every day I would climb up the ladder and I would sit at the end of the diving board trying to imagine myself walking off it. And after a while, people started coming and cheering me on, to jump off this board, and for five days, I tried, and I never did. I never jumped off it.” The solution? “I wrote a play – High Dive – where I cast the audience as the people around the pool.” 

The creative bounceback saw Ayvazian starring in the one-woman show, while the audience, holding scripts, yelled up at her. The gambit paid off, and there may not be a more perfect example of an artist facing their public, bones and all.

It’s just one example of Ayvazian turning adversity into art; a practice that also informs her pedagogy. 

She openly acknowledges the new challenges that students are facing inside and out of the classroom in a trying time both for the University, and the world. Growing up in a family of writers on the edge of unspeakable terror, she knows what it means to turn trying times into craft, and invites incoming artists to engage with the crisis at hand.

“My feeling is we are in the center of history right now. We are, Columbia is, in the center of history, and being here right now is microcosmic of the world. So come,” she said. “Something in you is going to mark this time of history. So come.

“If you're an artist, you work it. If you're an artist you think about it and reflect it in some way, and that's our job,” she continued. “What are our ethics and what do we stand up for? What do we fight for? What do we suffer for? There's also that: what do we suffer for? Because we are gonna suffer. We're in the arts, we're gonna suffer. So yeah, okay. How do we use that?”

It’s a role that extends far beyond the literal for Ayvazian, one that can manifest in the theatre in a myriad of meaningful ways, and she welcomes the results. “I personally go to the theater to be devastated. I want to be ripped apart in the theater. I want that. I want you to move me around so that I walk out a little unsteady.”

The role of suffering in the creation of art has a long and powerful history, but it’s also at odds with another project Ayvazian is tackling. In an aside too good to leave out, Ayvazian is struggling to write about her marriage, for a want of conflict. 

It was literally love at first sight. “He was not like any guy I’d ever met,” she recalled. “Everybody else I met smoked cigarettes like me and rode motorcycles like me and was sort of on the edge. And he was like this clean beauty standing in a doorway in California.”

She proposed on their second date, and the feeling never wore off. “I love him. And I wanna write about him, and you know how boring love is? It has to be complicated. It has to become un-love. But I don't have that. I have a deeply loving relationship with the man I've been with for 50 years. He's so cool. He's so cool.”

Next up for Ayvazian is a return to the world of Nine Armenians, after a shower thought had her revisiting a character she never quite liked, and the possibilities therein. The reinvention is underway.  

It’s not difficult to find the symmetry, that all these years later, at the head of her concentration, she would return to the play that first brought her to the School of the Arts. “I got invited here to teach a Master Class when I was not a master, I was just a person who had written one play. But I loved the students immediately.”

Even as a first-time professor, her brand of from-the-heart pedagogy was quickly embraced by students, who were determined to have her stay on at the school. “They asked for me,” she said, still very evidently honored by the endorsement of her student artists. 

That relationship has never changed, and she’s been teaching playwriting at Columbia ever since, still very much the person they hired for a Master Class a quarter century ago. “What I am in life is what I am in the classroom. I'm in the moment. I will listen to you,” said Ayvazian. “I will see your potential and honor it.”