The House of Bernarda Alba: An Adaptation

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After the funeral of his husband Bernarda tells her five daughters that they must go through an eight year mourning period for her dead husband, father to all of them except the eldest daughter Angustias who is from her first marriage. Bernarda orders La Poncia the housekeeper to close the windows and prevents any connection with the outside world.
She becomes an authoritarian force that controls her five daughters Angustias, Magdalena, Amelia, Martirio and Adela that each wants freedom and love, but only the youngest daughter Adela is brave to show her desire while Bernarda elderly mother María Josefa is also with her dream of lost love. Angustias is expected to be wed to Pepe that creates tensions between other sisters and eventually Adela announces that she has an affair with Pepe and Bernarda runs offstage with a shotgun to shoot the man. Martirio tells a lie that Pepe is dead, Adela hangs herself. After they find the body, Bernarda demands Adela be buried as a virgin.

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End Makam

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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.

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Autopsy

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‘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. 

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The Right Move

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The Right Move deals with the issues of Palestinian women in the Labor market, and work places. It tackles the women’s concerns, problems, and unfairness in dealing with their abilities. It sheds light on the issues of the gap between the wages of women and men in the labor market; the unemployment and the lower professional development opportunities for women than men.

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Hamlet Machine

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Hamlet Machine, written by Heiner Müller in 1977, was adapted by Ayham Majid Agha in 2018. The Exile Ensemble, of which Ayham serves as Artistic Director, has been part of the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin since the 2016/17 season. The ensemble’s seven actors are investigating the original texts alongside Ayham’s adaptation, as well as researching their own positions in an open ended project. With Hamlet Machine, they’re pursuing the dramatist who radically questions the intellectual’s position in a world that is out of joint, dissecting Shakespeare, among others, and then putting the remaining fragments together again.

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Ella Iza

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The production narrates the story of the residents of a building in Lebanon. The building is in bad condition and the residents want to fight for their demands to live safely in their building. They talk about pressuring those in power, but their arguments often take a sectarian turn with each resident showing off their pride for their sect and dissing that of others. While remembering their history though, they seem to stop recalling what has happened right before the civil war. Later, a journalist supposedly comes to document the residents’ calls for their rights to live safely in their building. However, it is revealed that she was actually researching something about the residents’ sects and reveals information that shocks the residents of the building. The production’s premiere was in 2018 following a series of events in Lebanon highlighting political corruption. Namely, in 2015, the garbage crisis in Lebanon was just starting and several protests were sparked because of that and very little reform has been made since then. Khabbaz’s play highlights the role of Lebanese people to rid themselves of those ideological sectarian beliefs in order to better the country. In a comedic way, he writes characters that want to improve, but find themselves struggling to denounce their own leaders’ wrongdoings.

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In the Name of the Father

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An Egyptian billionaire seems to be ruling the world. He is the absolute Patriarch. His empire extends to his five children who control all the aspects of economic corruption on a global scale. From human trafficking/slavery, to prostitution, human organs’ trade, monuments’s trafficking, weapon trade, drugs, to the biological manufacturing of viruses and the pharmaceutical trade it entails, to the business of war, famine and investing in weapons of mass destruction, the Patriarch and his family have dehumanised everything. Following the death of his abandoned son (from a second wife), the father decides to repent by offering to the dead son his share in his fortune. All the five children rebel against the father. Led by the eldest, Hazem, the brothers and sisters gather to plan for the assassination of their father. The aunt (sister of the father) -who is blind- is the only one who dares to confront the father with his truth. The wife and mother of the dead son fight over whether he should be butties according to the Christian or Muslim traditions. The mother (ex-wife of the father) is christian, while the father is muslim. The wife of the dead son is also christian. A debate over which religion he should follow in death takes place. The mother insists that he is buried in the islamic cemeteries of his father’s family, to guarantee his inheritance as a muslim son. Meanwhile the five brothers and sisters play a deadly game that ends up by killing someone.

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