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.

AssemblyWomen

Written mostly in an Iraqi dialect, the play is adapted from Aristophanes’ AssemblyWomen. Naeem added new characters like the First Chef and the Second Chef, who are both comedic and sarcastic. She also changed the characters’ names and some of their motivations, and took out sexual content and references. The story of the play starts when the women gather in the parliament in the absence of their husbands to form a government. They try several tricks on their husbands, so they don’t come to the parliament, such as hiding their socks or underwear. The play ends with the women declaring the formation of the women parliament. Both Aristophanes’ play and Naeem’s adaption criticize the current parliament led by men.

O Lord!

In this play, a mother who has lost her children protests against God and negotiates with Moses. The woman is sent to speak with God as an ambassador for mothers of the country who have lost their children to war, violence, and sectarian and ethnic displacement. Moses meets with the woman as God’s representative in Tuwa Valley, where God spoke to Moses. The mother presents her demands: stop the killing and destruction, preserve the lives of the remaining children, and spread love and harmony among all people. If these conditions are not met within 24 hours, she vows that all prayer, fasting and other acts of worship will be stopped. Moses tries to persuade the mother that nobody can impose their will on God, and that the earth’s misfortunes are caused by the creature (humankind), not by the Creator. Moses fails to convince the mother, and so he invites her to pray to God until He responds. However, the mother refuses to do so. Feeling powerless, Moses leaves his staff behind in heaven, and joins the mothers in demanding that God fulfill their wishes. 

The Widow

Samir, an outspoken young professor of English drama in post-Saddam Iraq, has an affair with his favorite student, Nour. She is a widow whose husband was a general in Saddam’s army and was killed in the First Gulf War in 1991. Samir flees Iraq for Canada to escape sectarian retaliation for his liberal views, leaving Nour dealing with the consequences of her pregnancy. Samir’s mother helps Nour abort the child. Samir, a jobless refugee in Canada, struggles to make sense of his life, and thus returns to Nour in Iraq despite his family’s warnings. Samir proposes to Nour on the banks of the Shatt al-Arab, a popular meeting place in Basra. A car with two gunmen pulls over and they shoot Samir dead. The play ends as Samir’s mother silently joins Nour on stage.

Ashes

A reporter is following a lawyer who trued to re open the case of a murdered woman by recalling her dead soul by her grave and interrogates her.

The Most Dangerous Highway in the World

The play Hair gives a panoramic view of hair as a political statement through the monologues of nine characters from different cultures, ethnicities, colours, ages and sexualities It aims to bring to light the objectification of women through the commercial use of hair, through the heritage of fairy tales which transfer the ownership of the female body and hair to the man, and by examining the voyeurism projected towards hair. It also employs irony in some monologues, movement and dance. In one of the nine monologues, Hair speaks for itself and reveals many taboos about itself. There we can easily see Hair as a symbol of the unspoken oppression and dehumanization imposed on women and people of color. Another monologue is the voice of pubic hair, where we can also confront a tradition of patriarchy that enslaves, mutes, and infantilizes female sexuality.

Heavens

Heavens closes the chapter of historical research we started in 2012 with Perform-Autopsy. Through this research, we gained insight into the private-public relationship with history. It revealed our incomplete historical empire: the curse of repetition and echoes, our fragile reality and selves, the breath-constricting anxiety when we attempt to bury the rubble of the past in denial and reconstruction, the fear, hatred and self-loathing at the thought of our murderers and reality silencers – and our victims, anxiousness over our struggles, actions and betrayals, nostalgia that sinks us in past events somehow linked to us.In this work, we come to a self realization as individuals. We have become what we lost and we have lost what we have become. Our history has reduced us to numbers that fuel a destructive controversy. We challenge that which paralyses us and denies us a future. Between the here and the there, the now and the then, recollecting our memories and our losses. On stage, we stand up so we can see, we speak out so that we may hear, we tell our stories so we can realize ourselves.

Fear

Set in a room that is almost made of waste, the conflict between the corrupt upper social class and the almost dehumanised characters of the under-privileged community takes place. The rich man -in his 40’s- seeks temporary refuge in the living space of the deprived man in his 30’s. The playwright shapes that encounter with a seemingly thriller style. The deprived man is almost insane, uttering aggressive words of accusation to the rich and the privileged. He seems to have escaped the police after having killed a police officer. With no shame, he admits to have been a drug dealer, but he does not admit of doing wrong by killing the police officer. He perceives it as an act of justice, because the police officer killed a poor soldier before his eyes. A round woman, Amira, joins the encounter. She is a friend of the lunatic man. Then a man in his 50’s -equally deprived and oppressed- joins as well claiming that the place is his. The playwright examines the vicious circle of poverty, violence and corruption, highlighting how big parts of the population were impoverished, destined to drug dealing and deprived from the basic rights of citizenship. At the end of the play, the rich business man steps out of the place knowing that the police forces are outside and assuming that he will be protected by them. Suddenly gun shots are heard, and the play ends without knowing who shot who. The question remains whether it was the young woman who has already threatened the rich man, or if it was the old poor man who claimed ownership of the gun, or if it was the police who shot the wrong guy mistaking him for the lunatic man who killed the police officer or may be it was justice done by mistake..

Plastic Dream

The play is among a very limited number of Egyptian plays that dealt with the revolution of 2011 and its repercussions in a critical way. “Plastic Dream” starts by revealing the labels and illusions related to the exoticisation of Egypt. First seen by the exoticising western tourist, then seen by the eyes of its own citizens, Cairo seems like a fairy tale where all the opposites meet. A place where dreams are killed, a square where revolution can be made, a society where everything can be bought with money, and a reality show where visiting Tahrir square has become a touristic fashion. It’s 2013, the Muslim Brotherhood have won the presidential and the parliamentary elections. The young generation is divided between the frustrated dream of freedom and dignity, and the promise of paradise if they join terrorist acts. The dream of a better tomorrow has no place to go now, except being stuck in the shores of illegal migration. The revolution has been labelled as a “spring”, and the quest for personal freedom, privacy and dignity has come to nothing. A black satire where migration could seem like a valid way out. Nonetheless a question remains unanswered: does the Egyptian migrant see the reality of the western society he/she aspires to live in? or are we all recycling mutual illusions and labels?..