THE show was about to begin at a Soviet-era playhouse with olive-green seats, antique Caucasian rugs and a tiled ceiling, in Yerevan, the Armenian capital. I was with a man almost 50 years my senior who, while giving me a tour of an experimental art center in a former disco that morning, had asked if I would join him at the State Theater of the Young Spectator that night.

Invitations like this are not uncommon in this country of 3.3 million, where tourists are still treated as guests to be invited home for coffee and sweets, or, as in this case, to be taken out to an avant-garde pantomime performance.

As the play began, it quickly became clear that this was nothing like the pantomimes put on for children in the West. This was a thrilling interpretive dance performance about a third-century martyr, St. Ardalion, his death suggested by the ribbon looped around his wrists and ankles. Ardalion had been hired to perform in a play that mocked Christianity, but he was inspired to convert onstage, and died for it instead.

The play aptly summed up Armenia, which is considered to be the first nation to adopt Christianity as its state religion, in A.D. 301, and which has persevered through the centuries despite being conquered by the Romans, the Persians, the Arabs, the Mongols, the Turks and, of course, the Soviets. It is a country that has not forgotten the Armenian genocide of the early 20th century, and whose national symbol, Mount Ararat, where many Christians believe Noah’s Ark landed, is now on the other side of the closed Turkish border.