The Final Month of the Fifth Year

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The Final Month of the Fifth Year tells the story of Jaber, a Palestinian-Syrian playwright who escaped Syria and lives as a refugee in Gaziantep, Turkey. Jaber is a journalist, and works with a radio station that supports the Syrian revolution. Jaber meets Fadl, a 20-year-old young man who escaped from Aleppo, and begins writing a play based on Fadl’s life, following his difficult journey from Aleppo to Idlib and eventually Turkey. Two additional characters are introduced: Tuba, a half-Turkish, half-Syrian girl who was born and raised in Turkey and who works as translator in the same radio that Jaber works for; and Younes, a Kurdish-Turkish young man, who once had a short-lived relationship with Fadl. Jaber finds himself losing faith in himself and his ability to tell stories, as the complexities of Fadl’s history multiply and embroil everyone around him. Ultimately, Jaber’s attempts wear away at his relationship with Wash, his girlfriend, a character we only meet over video calls. Jaber begins, too, to question his sexuality, and most characters question their understanding of the concept of identity.

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Before Dinner

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Before Dinner follows a single brutal night of conversation between a mother and a son. The mother is a schoolteacher, and the wife of a martyred Palestinian fedayi. The son is a theater student. Before Dinner is a play about generational struggle, and about the inheritance of a generation of young people who came of age during the Arab Spring. It is about what can be said and what can’t, and about the silences and absences that become deafening when parents and children can no longer hear each other. It is about the way successive disasters have forced specific cultural climates on each generation, and the different ways in which each generation finds itself haunted by defeat.

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The Rat

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This play is about the clash of the rat and 4 cats. Cats harm and domineer the rat and people. The rat as a leader resists attacks with people and eventually win. They resist cats by coming together in weddings, harvests etc… and reach a consensus how they fight to cats. Masks were used for cats and the rat ; but these animals were not played by imitating. They are like human. The rat represents of a Kurdish society who are under the control of the authority, are oppressed. Four cats (Turkey, Syria, Iran, Iraq) are authority. The literary source of the play is about the rat and the cat but in this play it is changed by four cats.

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Shahmaran

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“Sayê Moru” is the first play that performed entirely in Zaza language. The play was staged as narrated. It wasn’t rewritten. A non-Aristotelian staging was preferred via metaphoric and symbolic items that based on the Dersim (an area of eastern Turkey) version of the well-known “Shahmaran” fairy tale. The narrative is based on the theme of death-immortality. “Lokman Hekim” (Luqman the Wise) is looking for a solution to death. Before he died he legated 3 papers to his son Camisan. Camisan met Shahmaran in underground. At the end of the play, Camisan became “Luqman the Wise” like her father. Unlike other versions, Şahmaran is a bearded snake in “Sayê Moru”.

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The Hunter

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The play is about two smugglers (Şûrzal and Zanyar) in a village of Mardin. They are caught in a storm on the way back and lose their mules. A conflict occurs with the gendarmerie. The smugglers who take refuge in a village spend the night in the house of the village headman, Reşid. The soldiers come the village to find them. They don’t want the soldiers to persecute the peasant because of them. As the conflict broke out, Şûrzal flees; Zanyar is killed. Zanyar confronts Şûrzal in a dream, and it turns out that Şûrzal killed his sister and the woman’s (loved by Şûrzal) brother for affair of honour. In this play the scenery is a backdrop. It is a picture of a smuggler pulling a mule carrying a load. Pictures of Ehmedê Xanî, Melayê Cizirî, are also given prominent place on the set. The musicians and the dengbêj sit on the right side of the stage. It is the first time that dengbêj narrates a kilam that summarizes the preceding scene. Playwright wrote new kilams for the play.

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Six-Fingers Hand

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“Destê Şeş Tilî” came in first at the “4th Ebdurrehîm Rehmî Hekarî Play Writing Contest”. The playwright is a convicted prisoner. The play focuses on the war losses. There are 4 main characters in the play. A mother who did not accept the death of her son, who died six years ago in the war. A wounded man, who was supposed to have died during the conflict, was buried by his friends and after 3 days he came out under the ground. A sister who will be watering her brother’s grave and lamenting him for seven years. And a man is a betrayer who doesn’t go after his sins and fears he committed in the war. The main characters are in a timeless and space-free situation. Reality and dream are together in this play. The stage was covered with sand and It was interesting to see a man came out under sand at stage.

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Disco No.5

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Disco No.5 has been performed by Mirza Metin from Destar Theatre about the torture of Kurdish political prisoners in Diyarbakır Military Prison after military coup in Turkey (1980). The performance has been based on memories, books, documentaries and interviews about that period. In that one-act play the actor performed a spider, a rat, a dog, a prisoner and a jailkeeper by getting reality and fiction together. The characters/actions of the play have referred to reality of that period by fictioning. The group described their play as “confrontation plays”. Always welcomed with great admiration the play won “the best solo performance of the year”, “the actor of the year”, “the best performance of the year” awards.

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Under the Castle

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Mei and Po, two ugly, monster-like laundry women living in the basement of Macbeth’s castle, are the only ones who remember what Macbeth’s tragic story was. In an uncertain time after their Lord’s death and after all the awful things they witnessed, these two on stage with all their deformed, abject bodies start to tell and restructure this well-known story. They are both storytellers while they are enacting several characters from the story: narration and acting intertwine together and accompanied by a feminist dramaturgy and grotesque aesthetics. While the tragedy turns into a political burlesque consisting of the discourse of otherness, all the implications belonging to this idea range from gender, sex, ugliness to body, flesh, blood, and death takes place on stage. The set is composed of the laundry sheets that are used as proscenium arch and curtain, where they have been cleaning up all the bloody stains under the Macbeth’s castle, or in other words, all-pervading shambles in the history of ‘man’kind.

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Io

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Io is a contemporary text written in the form of a Greek tragedy by Şahika Tekand using the story and information from Greek mythology. The story is inspired by a mythological figure named Io who appears in a short scene in Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus. In Prometheus Bound, Io meets Prometheus during her exile and hears his prophecy about Zeus’ end. In Tekand’s tragedy, a long time after this meeting and all that happened, Io finally returns to her homeland, Argos. When she encounters the people of Argos, it turns out that her story was mistold, no one does neither listen nor believe her. They prefer to accept the story that they heard and keep things according to that, instead of finding out about the truth. Then, Hermes, Kratos, and Bia appear as the representatives of Zeus to force her to stay silent; but Io keeps telling the truth. While people cannot understand who is right and what is the truth, Prometheus appears and explains the human’s blind side: people always tend to forget in order to keep conformity. As they forgot about the fire he’d stolen from the Titans and gave them before, now they prefer not to the truth about Io. In the end, Io’s unstoppable rebellious voice is interrupted by the absolute darkness of oblivion.

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Lick But Don’t Swallow! (Little Fantasy)

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Lick But Don’t Swallow! (Little Fantasy) is a play written by Özen Yula that is one of the texts of his Objection Plays series. It is a story about a dream of an angel/porn star who tries to save humanity. By divine rule, angels are sent to the Earth once in every hundred years in a human body and they must convince at least one person to follow the moral goodness in their 24 hours. This is the only condition to stay as an angel for one more hundred years; and if she/he fails she/he will get stuck in the world as a mortal human being.

The play takes place on the set of a porn movie in Turkey where an angel finds herself in the body of a porn star named Leyla. She tries to raise awareness of set workers for the world matters while the filming of the porn movie scenes continues. According to the biriken, the duo staging the play, Lick But Don’t Swallow! (Little Fantasy) is on one side brings out present-day harsh realities through the porn star Leyla, “on the other hand, it chooses a platform where it cancels out everything it tells about, denies the reality surrounding us, and where the only reality is hedonism.”

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