Trace

 The play dwells on the stories of people who live in the same mansion in Tarlabaşı (a historic and diverse community neighborhood in Istanbul that was declared a regeneration area by the government in 2006), in three different periods of Turkey’s late history. Stories of two Greek / Turkish sisters in the 1950s, a landlord from the Black Sea region and his communist tenant in the 1980s, then a transvestite and his lover in the 2000s intertwine together and develop parallelly. Trace staged in a mansion like an apartment building converted into a theater space by using its different rooms with a cinematographic dramaturgy. The seats and a couple of monitors were located in a single room which can be considered as the main stage; and several cameras were placed in the back rooms. The audience could see the action on the main stage and simultaneously followed what was happening on the back rooms from the monitors through online streaming.

These three testimonial stories belonged to the mansion reveal the covert histories belonged to the others. Trace, as one of the memory plays in peculiar to the recent playwriting trends in Turkey, probes into root-bound matters of the country’s late history by focusing on various sorts of minorities and so-called extremists ranging from LGBTI and communists to Greeks and Kurds.