The Istanbul Municipal Theater will stage Hakob Paronyan’s “Eastern Dentist” as a musical in the new season, marking the first time an Armenian play will be staged at a state theater in Turkey, Hürriyet Daily News reported.

“Armenians are the foundation of Turkish theater. Artists bred in this area are the DNA of this land. We need to claim our past if we want to modernize. Unfortunately, we are a society without a memory,” said Ayşenil Şamlıoğlu, Istanbul Municipal Theater’s general art director.

“The theater would be greatly pleased to bring the play to Armenia with its huge cast as well,” Şamlıoğlu added.

“We also marginalize our people. We ignored people who had been living on this soil for thousands of years due to ideological reasons. It is impossible for us to eradicate Armenian artists from Turkish theater,” Engin Algan, who adapted Paronyan’s work for the stage, recently said.

Algan encountered Paronyan’s name by chance in a theater magazine called “Mimesis.” He then found out about the work on the Internet.

“We would not have been able to stage this play in previous years even if we had wanted to. We went through difficult times. There would certainly have been major outrage if we had said that we were going to stage such a play in a public theater,” Algan said.

“It is highly important to perform such a play at a time when enmity is used as a political tool and the winds of nationalism have taken hold of the new generation. We shared a common life 100 years ago. It is this common past that carried us into the present. We are used to burying our heads in the sand, but we can no longer continue on like this,” he said.