Join us for a glass of wine, a taste of halva, a cup of coffee, a light (and dark) laugh, and a play that asks:
How can friends do justice to each other when they have almost nothing in common?
This is the question that award-winning playwright Deniz Başar, a first-generation immigrant to Canada from Turkey, took up through writing Wine&Halva in a style known in West Asia and throughout the Middle East as narrative theatre.
Audiences are invited into the atmosphere of an Istanbul coffee house, where the air is heavy with music and literature, political tension and resistance, humour and hope.
Three narrators guide their audience through an intimate epic of an unusual friendship between two protagonists: Farias (meaning Lighthouse) is a white gay man from a fictional North-American city, where he finds himself trapped in a low-pay menial service job with little hope for the future; while Derya (meaning Sea) is a Turkish woman who emigrates to North America to complete her PhD, and, to her surprise, becomes a visible minority. Wine & Halva explores the labour and joy of their friendship as a force of resistance.
