Cinema

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Cinema is a political satire which criticises the fragility of the Iraqi political status quo and delves into the perspective of the dead. The play is set in a graveyard where four corpses rise from their graves, and start a conversation about how and why they ended up there. The figures are: an officer from the Iraq–Iran War; a female journalist who died in one of the bombing explosions in Baghdad after 2003; a young man who failed to find a job as a postgraduate student and decided to work as a taxi driver, but was killed during the ethnic violence; and a poet. All are joined later on by the graveyard keeper who shares with them his daily problems and strife in a lawless city. The play is a black comedy that criticises politicians, wars and systematic corruption, but most importantly it mocks death. The four corpses get up from their graves to protest against the increasing numbers of dead people buried in the graveyard.

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I Love You Turkey

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The play tells the story of an unexpected encounter of five young people at a laundromat in the middle of Istanbul. One of them is an employee at the facility and the others are customers waiting for their laundry since there is a water supply cut in the neighborhood. At first they don’t seem like they have anything in common to share. However, once the employee suspiciously reveals a situation that may cause one of these customers to find themselves in a criminal offense, the story unfolds to present each character’s own perspective on how they see the society they live in. Text successfully utilizes post dramatic approach in its structure. While characters try to prove their innocence we hear conversations and monologues that are reflecting their positions and reactions for Turkey’s current political climate. Play’s choice of space and time playfully brings characters who are quite alike together so throughout the play it is possible to understand several perspectives about Turkey as if we are presented an extensive discussion of issues of 2010s such as Gezi Protests, recent military coup d’etat attempt and its aftermath, leaving country for good etc. Rather than constructing a definitive conclusion, the play poses several questions letting the audience keep themselves once the play is over such as: At which age does one feel themselves responsible about the issues of the world around them?

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Light Theory

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While tremendous political and cultural changes have been happening in Turkey beginning from the second half of 2010s many well educated people started asking themselves whether they want to leave the country or not. Light Theory is about this feeling in Istanbul that a lot of people are experiencing at this time: Finding themselves in a situation in which one will be forced to leave where they were born and live. There are stories of three people in the play: Anna is a scholar from Medieval Istanbul, Feraye is a young student who fled the war in Syria and came to Istanbul, Kaan is a thespian who is preparing to leave Istanbul for good. All of them are forced to leave a place at different times, and they all stop and think whether they forgot something just before they shut their suitcases. Then an archaeologist from a very far future introduces her discovery, which tells us their stories. As their lives are shaped by obligatory journeys, Light Theory imagines the potential meanings of the marks left on our shared futures, which we assume will fade away in time.

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Truth, A Day For Sure

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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.

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Skeleton of an Elephant in the Desert

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Skeleton of an Elephant in the Desert focuses on loneliness and murder. It’s about four characters in a destroyed city, about a circus on the frontlines of battles, about unmarked and un-murdered corpses, about a sniper postponing the death of a nurse, about who is documenting the incidents, and about the last witness.

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Oh My Sweet Land

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Called “extraordinary” by the San Francisco Chronicle, Oh My Sweet Land returns to Bay Area home and community kitchens after a sold-out pilot run in October 2017. The tour-de-force solo show, based on interviews with Syrian refugees in Jordan, takes an unflinching and personal look at the Syrian refugee crisis, and the brutal war that led up to it. In the play, a woman of mixed Syrian-German parentage recalls her encounter with Ashraf, a Syrian man in Paris, all the while preparing kibbeh, a Syrian delicacy. When he disappears, she goes on an arduous journey in search of him that leads to stirring conversations with some of the two-million Syrian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan. One part detective story, one part a woman’s reckoning with her heritage, Oh My Sweet Land offers an intimate and nuanced perspective on the conflict in Syria and highlights the resilience of the Syrian people. Oh My Sweet Land runs one hour followed by a 30-minute food sharing and community conversation. Instead of a traditional theater space, Oh My Sweet Land will be performed in kitchens around the Bay Area with performances followed by food sharing and community conversations. The performance includes the cooking of meat, onions, wheat, and spices.

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No Demand No Supply

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On the 27th of March 2016, the inquisitorial commission in Mount Lebanon raided “Chez Maurice” and “Silver” brothels in Jounieh area, east of Beirut, and saved seventy-five Syrian refugee women from what became known later as the largest sex trafficking network in the history of Lebanon. The story gained huge media attention as the women told horrifying stories about the torture and abuse they suffered at the hands of one of the lead figures of the network, which was making more than one million dollars a month according to the police reports. Few weeks after the uncovering of the story, the media lost interest in it and slowly it started fading into oblivion. No Demand No Supply aims at giving voice to the women’s stories while shedding light on an aspect that was totally disregarded in the mainstream media: the sex buyer. The play is still as relevant today as it was in 2017. The court hearings are still in progress. So far, almost three years after closing down the brothels, seven court hearings took place in which nothing really happened because some of the accused are simply not showing up at the court. The victims are still waiting for justice while Imad Al-Rihawi, the trafficker who was in charge of managing the network and torturing the women, was released on a 20 million Lebanese pound (approximately 13 thousand dollars) bail on June 20, 2017, and Fawaz Ali Al-Hassan, the head of the network, was never caught.

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The Blue Pink

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A journalist is investigating story of Shahrzad, a transgender woman killed by her son through interviews with her transgender friends and other acquaintances including a relative, a social worker, a child labour and her housemate who is a sex worker. Shahrzad formerly known as Majid has a difficult time expressing her sexual identity since childhood until marriage, which she breaks off and leaving for the big city of Tehran without knowing that she has left a son behind. She is living in a trans community and finally able to obtain money and legal permits for sex change operation, she is happily married to a transgender man but after a long journey of transformation her past comes to hunts her. While her husband, friends narrates Shahrsad life they also unravels their own sad tales of discovery, harsh cruelties in the society and transformation and even recounts the history of Khomeini’s fatwa on sex reassignment surgery. These characters have faced common conditions and plights in the society facing violence, rape and poverty.

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