Review: L'Espace la Risée Presents WINE AND HALVA By Deniz Başar

This past spring L’Espace la Risée cabaret at the Rue Bélanger in Montreal welcomed a full-length drama, Deniz Başar’s Wine and Halva. The play employs a nearly improvisational dynamism as it explores the limitations of Western liberalism. In the play two young artist-academics dissect these questions. Their discourse intensifies as they navigate theoretical disagreements alongside their contrasting lived experience. This somewhat polemic discourse is buoyed by a coming-of-age friendship. The ingenuity of the staging in this intimate cabaret space highlights the creative collaboration of both performance and debate.

The three performers, Corbeau Sandoval, Banafsheh Hassani, and Esi Callender, share roles. Through the two acts each performer takes their turn in the role of Derya, a leftist Turkish playwright, Farias, a white Canadian performer, and scene Narrator. Each performer mines their role for compassion, indignation, righteousness, and sanctimony. None of them remain static as they confront the shifting tides of global politics, coming of age, and their own evolving relationship.

Following a prologue reminiscent of the witches in Macbeth, the plot begins in earnest in a Berlin subway where Derya (meaning “sea”) and Farias (meaning “lighthouse”) meet. He is a working-class stand-up comedian and student from the small fictional city of New Stockholm in Canada and she is an academic at the same university. Their relationship builds from a conversation turned debate. It’s not the sort of “dunk on the other” debate that has come to define much of political discourse, but the kind where one can become more curious about the other’s position. Derya, who lacks an American passport, is questioned by German authorities. Farias, who lacks the financial and emotional sport of Derya, lacks her academic vocabulary and has struggled in the service industry since he was 14. Where they lack mutual understanding, they grow in mutual respect.

Derya’s curiosity leads her to attending Farias’s stand-up performance. She finds that Farias avoids challenging his audience. He is an extension of the insincere, if serene, world of New Stockholm. The play takes the cast through Berlin, New Stockholm, New York and, at the end, a reunion in Istanbul. Başar’s play intertwines harsh realities of the queer community in Türkiye, with the languishing despair and simmering fascism of Canadian suburbia. While Türkiye might be an “open air prison” for dissidents, the condescending treatment she received from academia leads Derya to leave New Stockholm behind.

Within their conversations Farias convinces Derya that what he’s enduring can be described as a struggle. However, she implores him to not greet this struggle with a complacent shrug, but to confront it within his art. This conversation underpins the dramatic structure of the play which borrows from the Turkish “Orta Oyunu” dramatic tradition. Başar and director Art Babayants implement Orta Oyunu’s structural qualities such as performance in the round, continual breaking of the fourth wall, and conflict between two main characters. They also implement its aesthetic qualities. Orta Oyunu, as Derya explains to Farias after attending his stand up, can make people laugh. The performance has the spark of improvisational wit, but it’s not confined to this expectation. It can also confront its audience with uncomfortable questions. People attend Orta Oyunu for something lively, creative, and profound.

For the artists the performance space is a place of play and politics. Debate is an act of intimacy and confrontation. These contrasts need not live divorced from one another. Scenographer Candan Seda Balaban enlivened the cabaret space so that the actors move amongst the audience. The performers exchanged their characters with grace. The work’s occasionally cartoonish vivacity teeters on the edge magical realism. All the same, the cast never loses the pulse of the audience surrounding them, the warmth of the characters they’re displaying, nor the depth of the questions they’re confronting.
Photo Credit: Art Babayants and Paul Stoesser