It is May 4, 2024, in Montreal, and I walk on Rue Bélanger as the night is approaching on this lightly colored spring day. I am about to see Wine & Halva, a production partnership between Postmarginal Theatre and Toronto Laboratory Theatre, in association with Sort of Productions. The show will take place in L’Espace la Risée, which I later learned is known mostly for burlesque, cabaret, and stand-up performances. What I found particularly creative and mind-opening was how the play used this cabaret space to create a permeable performative circle that encompassed the entire audience and the performers. The decision to turn the cabaret stage into an Orta Oyunu performance space struck me as very special; a rare artistic and political choice for North American stages.
The play is written by Deniz Başar, directed by Art Babayants, and performed by three young performers in their twenties: Corbeau Sandoval, Banafsheh Hassani, and Esi Callender. I later learn that there are three other key people whose labor needs to be mentioned: costume and prop designer Candan Seda Balaban, who managed to create a completely fleshed-out fictional universe out of so few elements; stage manager Shawna Blain, who was a locomotive of organization through and through; and finally Vik Hovanisian, who did an exceptional job in translating a difficult English text into French for the surtitles. By nature, the medium of theatre is a work of collectives, and just as a functioning political collective cannot be broken into its individuals, the collective labor that went into making of Wine & Halva goes beyond the list of names above. Then, one might ask, how did the play manage to give rise to such an artistic and political community around it? I get a sense of it when I experience the play myself.
Photos from Wine & Halva. Written by Deniz Başar. Directed by Art Babayants. Performed by Corbeau Sandoval, Banafsheh Hassani, and Esi Callender. Photo credits: Art Babayants and Paul Stoesser
In the current political and socioeconomic climate, which reminds us of the interwar period with all its problems of “order,” using humor to criticize Western liberal democracies and their contradictions is once again quite meaningful. Being in a cabaret space that is—maybe for the first time—being used for the full run of a professional play reminds me of the Weimer Republic performances of the then-emerging Bertolt Brecht, when under the fragile surface of democracy many evils to come were looming. Today, it appears that many people wish something “new” could emerge soon, but do not intend to dig into the tapestry of “micro” level interactions depicting the actual predicament we all witness in Western democracies, which, as many feel, are about to crumble. This becomes evident when we look at the international management of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the aftermath of October 7, 2023. Right before that, the COVID-19 pandemic and its variants were one of the major causes for contemplating injustices, inequalities, and power share asymmetries globally. The 2020 lockdown forced everyone to think about their own lifestyles, positions, mistakes, failures, true needs, and ambitions. These were repressed thoughts that we forgot or escaped to consider in the rush of life, which were actually the core problems of our human condition. The old or “current” world is now becoming unsustainable, and the crisis that it is revealing makes us question the relationship between things that we did not have enough courage to challenge before. However, the crisis of Western liberalism is at the same time stimulating imagination and creativity in the search of new solutions. This was my take from the production of Wine & Halva as I was surrounded by the laughter of people like me, and the offended silence of people who are seemingly more comfortable with the current state of the world. The production was accompanied by multiple images of Istanbul as a city of history and cats (L’Espace la Risée was turned into an almost impromptu exhibition space as part of the show), halva, and Turkish coffee. The audience was also invited to purchase wine or beer at the bar, which was located right in the auditorium. Wine & Halva was replete with dark humor, which consistently created a sense of discomfort, even in those inclined to agree with the political suggestions of the performance.
Photos from Wine & Halva. Written by Deniz Başar. Directed by Art Babayants. Performed by Corbeau Sandoval, Banafsheh Hassani, and Esi Callender. Photo credits: Art Babayants and Paul Stoesser.
The setup was effective in making the audience feel quite friendly with each other. I was seated next to Peter Farbridge, one of the producers of the play, and we ended up sharing a chat, talking about who we were and how we ended up at this event. When I looked around, I saw that many people were inclined to talk to each other and get to know each other a little just like us, in marked contrast to audiences at a proscenium stage production. Two or three people shared each table, upon which were candles, small booklets with Istanbul-Constantinople-Byzantium illustrations, and paper cup artworks (made by Candan Seda Balaban) with different quotes written inside them. The atmosphere made me feel like the people who were watching the play with me were friends with whom I would drink a coffee and have a chat in a cozy, familiar place. The actors immersed themselves in their roles and the chemistry amongst them was tactile, which translated the tensions of the plot into our collective bodily responses as the audience. Even though they acted consecutively for such a long time (two and a half hours), their performances were impeccable and vibrant.
Photos from Wine & Halva. Written by Deniz Başar. Directed by Art Babayants. Performed by Corbeau Sandoval, Banafsheh Hassani, and Esi Callender. Photo credits: Art Babayants and Paul Stoesser.
The action of the play is scattered throughout diverse spaces. Narrated and performed by the three actors—who appear as muse-like creatures who alternately inhabit the two characters who are non-native English speakers, immigrants, queer people, and people of color—the story focuses on the storyline of a particular friendship. More specifically, it examines how friends can do justice to each other when times get darker and supporting one another becomes very difficult, especially under situations of severe precarity. The first protagonist, Derya (meaning Sea in Turkish), is a woman from Istanbul who immigrates to North America to complete her PhD. The second character, Farias (meaning Lighthouse in Portuguese), is a white, working-class gay man from a fictional North American city named New Stockholm. Derya and Farias meet through the university that they are both enrolled in and then become close friends. Having been through some of the experiences of Derya—as a female academic and allophone person from Turkey living in Canada who is fluent in both English and French and who does not belong to a represented group—I felt profoundly connected to the story at many points in the play. For instance, through some linguistic challenges and misunderstandings that Derya faced in the play, I contemplated the importance of listening to the voices of allophone people accurately. Derya is trained in academic English but lacks skills of colloquial spoken English; her vocabulary is crowded with words such as “centripetal” and “chronotope” but she doesn’t know what “peek-a-boo” is. I considered how significantly improved the immigration experience could be if people learned how to listen to second-language speakers of a language before making quick judgments about them and silencing them. I thought about the power and solidarity created through friendship as I witnessed how Farias learned to listen to Derya, which supported him to eventually break free from the harsh rhetoric of North America that doesn’t allow him to articulate his lived experience. I felt the value of genuine friendship while watching the play, and it made me thankful for the ones who stood beside me when times were getting dark and bitter in my life. There were times when I found myself reacting to some of the jokes alone, and there were also moments of more collective giggling amongst the audience. Scene 2: Changing Planes was the part where I found myself especially confronted with some ugly past events I remembered well, and I had flashbacks of my own experience living in Turkey in the mid-2010s, reminding me of my despair and hopelessness from that time.
Photos from Wine & Halva. Written by Deniz Başar. Directed by Art Babayants. Performed by Corbeau Sandoval, Banafsheh Hassani, and Esi Callender. Photo credits: Art Babayants and Paul Stoesser.
The play begins in Berlin, a city where, according to the narrator, one protagonist “enters from the West and the other—from the East”—to which another narrator responds, “just like Istanbul, where East meets West.” Both characters go to Berlin as part of a fully funded group of bachelors and graduate students from their university in New Stockholm to study for a short time, and their differences in life experience are immediately presented to us. Derya does not have a first-world passport like Farias and the rest of the group, so she is questioned at the German airport, which causes her to miss her connecting flight. She is pulled back by a global hierarchy even in this very first moment, giving us a sense that she struggled more than others to be part of that group. On the other hand, Farias, who appears to be ignorant and naïve at the beginning, is later revealed to be brutally exploited by the system of North American capitalism which pushed him at the age of 14 into low-paying, part-time service jobs. He was therefore unable to invest the same amount of time and labor in his intellectual growth as Derya, whose own growth was supported by what is hinted to be a more economically and emotionally supportive family.
After the Berlin scene, we are suddenly thrown into a darker place in Scene 2: Changing Planes. This is where the audience finds themselves experiencing mood swings, from bitterness to joyfulness with a high dose of dark humor, always kept curious about what is going to happen next. These dark episodes take place amidst the political atmosphere of Turkey in 2015 and 2016 respectively: the state violence perpetuated by the Turkish Republic against Kurds; the peace petition signed by academics in response to human rights violations committed by the government; and, in an extreme example of the results of the collective violence against the LGBTQ+ community in Turkey, the killing of trans activist and sex worker Hande Kader, whose corpse was set on fire by one of her clients. Derya experiences these dark events firsthand as Farias struggles to understand what is happening to his friend. The play emphasizes the names of some of the signatories of the peace petition—one of whom, Mehmet Fatih Tıraş, committed suicide after losing his job, and another, Nuriye Gülmen, who started a hunger strike and then lost her health permanently. Derya, who witnesses all these episodes, compares the experience of the dissident people of Turkey to living in an open-air prison. While also relating her observations on the academics coming to New Stockholm (Derya’s current city of residence) to find peace and happiness, it is clear that New Stockholm—“the capital of tokenism,” as the narrators call it—is a city where insincerity has become the basis of its culture.
Photos from Wine & Halva. Written by Deniz Başar. Directed by Art Babayants. Performed by Corbeau Sandoval, Banafsheh Hassani, and Esi Callender. Photo credits: Art Babayants and Paul Stoesser.
Starting from the third scene, Farias drops his bubbly and flamboyant façade and opens up about his precarious and economically harsh life as a working-class white gay man from North America, trying to make ends meet working in the service industry since he was a minor. He also reveals his experiences of seeing a free speech event organized by a far right-wing group in New Stockholm. Facing academic bullying from her supervisor at the university, Derya finds refuge in this friendship which the protagonists call “a central mobilizing force” for imagining a more justice-oriented future. Part of this scene featured the narrator (Corbeau Sandoval) portraying a white woman crying, humorously dissecting how a white woman’s tears can become her most powerful weapon against immigrants or people of color who don’t always reassure her that she is doing well. The exchanges between Derya and Farias and the friendship that they develop through joy and labor become forces of resistance to the injustices they both face in the play. These dialogues of the characters, henceforth, weave the way for potential justice in the near future.
The story ends in Istanbul, with Derya bringing Farias to her own city—which is, as the narrator describes it, “made out of poetry.” To me, this was the most effective scene of the play, as the audience is left with contrasting emotions ranging from extreme sadness to happy laughter and joy. In the end, the question of how to build dialogues that can trigger paradigm shifts remains crucial, and the act of revisiting one’s own background to see their points of privilege and oppression in relation to people who come from different walks of life becomes a vital component for the very future of humanity. As the play shows, only this revisiting and rethinking, starting from the most micro-level interactions with a potential to spiral into global collectives, can help alleviate the current crises, wars, conflicts, and injustices.
This post was written by the author in their personal capacity.The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the view of The Theatre Times, their staff or collaborators.
