Wine&Halva

Wine & Halva is a play about the unconventional friendship between Farias, a white (or white-passing) gay man from a fictional Anglophone Canadian city called ”New Stockholm,” and Derya, a Turkish woman who immigrated to that fictional city and needs to deal with many invisible cases of institutional discrimination alone. Wine&Halva is an open and playful text, with three narrators getting in and out of these two characters throughout the play to underline the fluid nature of identity in different contexts. The story focuses on how these two people from very different histories and struggles learn (and perhaps invent) ways to support and love each other. Wine&Halva challenges multiple, widely-accepted Canadian assumptions about immigration and represents the nature of institutional discrimination along with its possible impact on the human psyche, especially under conditions of extreme precarity.

Io

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.

Hair

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.

Drowning in Cairo

Drowning in Cairo follows the lives of three Egyptian gay men from different walks of life, whose fate forces them together time and again over a 20 year period. The play is set between 1997 and 2017 as Moody, Khalid and Taha age from 13 to 33 and the political system and queer life transform around them. In eleven episodic scenes, Drowning in Cairo chronicles the contemporary history of the queer community’s relationship to the law and public space in Egypt.

Broken Window

Some time before the revolution of 2011, the playwright had already envisioned the kind of revolt that was about to explode, and -with it- the necessity for an artistic expression that would bridge the gap between the unspoken oppression and the manipulated platforms of public opinion. In that context, she created “Made in Egypt”, a story about an Egyptian Bo-Azizy, a man who -instead of setting his body on fire like in Tunisia- kills his own family with a poisonous meal. Not far from reality, the story had many connections with several incidents of Egyptian fathers killing their own children out of mercy, and sometimes killing themselves afterwards. The facts of poverty and de-humanisation were beyond imagination.
Here the father eventually fails inches crime. The poison had no effect. Like many products carrying the mark of “made in Egypt”, the poison was a failure. Although a happy failure, the highly dramatic event in the text is a double criticism towards oppression and poverty on one hand, and towards the massive failure of Egyptian industry and economy, a failure of Egyptian nationalism. Staged in 2019 under a new title: “A Broken Window”, the play shows a middle class family that is stuck between poverty, ignorance, superstition, corruption and the continuous sexual harassment against women.

Memorial

Memorial is a verbatim play that uses embodied rituals and practices to tell the story of the Christchurch Muslim community during and following the two mosque shootings that occurred on March 15th, 2019 in Christchurch, New Zealand. Memorial chronicles the impact of the shootings through the words and experiences of seven citizens of Christchurch, focusing on the friends and families of those who were lost in the attacks. It also deeply engages with themes of migration, diaspora, the experience of otherness, and xenophobia.