It’s Never Gonna be the Same! Wipe Your Tears

The play is a one-man performance and one of the first works concerning the Gezi Park Resistance that emerged in 2013. Staged by Mek’an Sahne, it tells Gezi’s story through the eyes of a street child. Avzer / Mustafa is a teenager now who was left at the age of three at an orphanage by his mother. When he grows up, he escapes from the orphanage and lives alone in the streets of Ankara. He sleeps in abandoned buildings. When he wakes up one morning, he encounters a completely different city occupied with thousands of people protesting on the streets and parks. Though he can not understand what happened at all, he likes the feeling of brotherhood and enthusiasm carried by the demonstrators and then he becomes involved in the movement.. The dramatic change sparking his story will come when he meets the “girl and boy”.
During the performance, he sits on a chair on the empty stage, smokes weed and speaks the street language. He tells his story and asks the audience where “the girl and boy” are now in order to retrieve the lost and missed opportunities he gained in occupy days.

The Sack of the Witch

The Sack of the Witch is the pioneer example of the field of politicizing transgender life stories in Turkey. Written and performed by the feminist, activist, and trans performer Esmeray, the performance is based on her real-life story from her childhood in Kars, eastern Turkey, to her migration to Istanbul. She works in different jobs but then becomes a sex worker. Her life is difficult because, as well as being trans, she is also Kurdish. When she acquaints us with ideas of feminism, women’s rights, and leftism she becomes an activist struggling for sexual and ethnic identity and gives up sex labor. Based on a feminist and humorous approach, her performance takes the audience into a journey from the 80s and 90s to 2000s, showing socio-political events and revealing relations based on gender, national, ethnicity, and class questions.

End Makam

The year 1918. Ottoman Istanbul is under occupation. Once-famous poet Şehvar Hanım now lives alone in her ruined mansion and suffers from typhus. Her maid Sabriye visits Şehvar on her last days. Two women revive the past from different times and memories. The songs that are composed by Sabriye with reference to Şehvar’s poems accompany this time journey. As the story opens, it reveals the hidden love between two women, class differences, hidden songs, and changing lives with the war for liberty and unrealized potentials due to the historical and social circumstances. Staged by Altıdan Sonra Tiyatro, End Makam is a historical drama combining the elements of classical Turkish music and feminist approaches. It re-tells and reveals the stories of women who have been hidden in history. It is one of the first plays drawing attention to the love between women from different classes. It also shows how a servant can become both a composer and a revolutionist.

The Real Gala

The Real Gala is a comedy for two staged by Tiyatrotem. Mrs. Müesser and Mr. Lütfi who are not performers come to the stage for the first time to tell their life story. They can not start to tell their own stories since they are so excited about being on stage. What they try to tell about their life is based on third-page tragicomic news and today’s rated and popular television programs. Are they real or fake? When it comes to the pathetic stories, their presence on stage begins to change and they make the audience believe what they tell through the joyful and painful stories. However, in the end, they confess that none of them belongs to their own.
The Real Gala combines the traditional storytelling forms with the questions of representation and theatricality and it concerns the relations between the self and role, reality and fiction, telling and performing, authenticity and insincerity.

Truth, A Day For Sure

Truth, A Day For Sure is the story of a journey constructed with metaphors in search of a child’s letter to his mother. The action takes in a distant fairy tale country which will turn into a dystopia, where the sun is forbidden and the truth is covered. When the colorful world of childhood is destroyed by the violence, pressure, and silencing mechanism, the story begins to carry the language of mices and crows. However, by the metaphors of sunflowers, it also raises hopes that truth will reveal in any case, even though the sun is forbidden in this ‘distance’ country. Staged by D22, the performance contains indirect references to the current political and social conflicted atmosphere in Turkey ranging from censorship, the restriction of ‘freedom of thought’ to the civil deaths and arrested people for criticizing the government as well as it questions the nature of the concept of truth itself. This play won the 25 Cevdet Kudret Literature Prizes in field of best drama in 2017.

The Fox Hunt

A story of Agha Mohammad Khan Qajar , the founder of Qajar dynasty in 18th century and how historical and social climate of the time has formed his tragic life and turned him to a brutal king. The Eunuch monarch has paradoxical persona that has fears and compassion, while he acts grotesque with his statuesque figure he commits cruel crimes and kills his brothers. The setting of the play is in a mortuary that creates surreal atmosphere, where the egotist antihero is schemes and sends all the characters to their deaths but at last he is also end up dead.

Afra or Another Passes

Afra is a teacher from a working class family with a retired mother that used to serve in the house of a Qajar princess, while her father, an official clerk has passed away , Afra tries to makes ends meet by tutoring old Qajar princess’s son but the princess treated her badly scheming his dim wit son marrying Afra but her offer is rejected by Afra that claims she has a suitor as a pretext.
The conflict with the bourgeoisie and working class rises when the princess accuses Afra of stealing so she would marry her son to avoid her reputation destroyed but again she refuses, the other characters in working class join the opposing voices against Afra and drag her to police station for persecution since she is no longer belongs to her own class either.
Meanwhile a police officer and a real estate audit investigate the events and proves Afra’s innocence by the end the story is being read in a newspaper by a story teller that decides to change it and claim he is the imaginary suitor to create a happy ending.

Writing in the Dark

A group of friends who are journalists are plan a holiday to the north of the country, but each one starts to debate whether it’s good to travel, that eventually leads to a vote and signifies the lack of a common goal among these friends. Nima is a photo journalist who has been arrested for documenting a protest, and being questioned by an interrogator.

In another timeline, Nima and his journalist friends are again on holiday in Germany, discussing the possible call for asylum, but only one decides to become a refugee. It appears that Nima is no longer in the interrogation room suggesting he is dead, while his friends seated separately on chairs watch the blindfolded being investigated by a young interrogator.

Born in 1361

Born in 1361 portrays the life of a girl born in 1982 (the Iranian year 1361) through ages of 6, 13, 22, and 28 until her death. The play is a monologue in several episodes describing the sociopolitical challenges in Iran that affected the life of Nava and her generation. The play starts from the viewpoint of a fetus in her mother’s womb, describing how it has conceived to her still born twin sister and being born under the air raids during the Iran-Iraq war. Nava continues to grow to a young girl, discovering social contrasts in her life, and then witnessing limitations of the society and the sociopolitical changes of the 90s, adulthood and marriage, facing the post-election events in the 2009 that eventually leads her to illegal immigrate by boat and being drowned. The first production of Born in 1361 was performed with an all-female cast. Each actress portrayed a different episode from the life of the female character.

Autopsy

‘Autopsy’ begins with a disturbing scene in which actors emerge one by one from their shrouds (white cloths covering their bodies), improvise dialogues, and submerge back into their dark and isolated space. Actors randomly involve the audience in their improvisations by using symbolic props that include white cloth and shroud, a belt and a red lipstick. The play displays the challenges of the transgender community that resonate in an episode about a trans person’s marriage to a cis woman due to pressure from society.