And you are out!

A fateful nursery rhyme: The protagonists in “The Ugly Human-ling” are eternal outsiders in society and their own homes.

Pfui! Ugly! Elif Ürse, Yelda Baskın and Gülce Uğurlu. Photo: Martin Kaufhold.

The outlines of bodies are painted on the back wall, as if marked off with chalk by the police after an accident. In the collective production by the Turkish off-theatre group  oyun deposu, the outlines symbolize the profiles that three rather lively Turkish women – who are not the way other people think they should be – yearn to fit into. They are all young and beautiful girls who wish that these were the only reasons people notice them. In the beginning, they attempt to cram themselves into the outlines of their desired formats, gasping as they bend and stretch to fit. They are ultimately forced to give up trying.

Each of them has her own, fragmented story to tell. Though their narrative lines never cross, they do hold parallels. A few situations arise on stage that each of the women has to deal with. They have one thing in common: Each of them is an irritation, a nuisance to Turkish society caught between tradition and modern life. And they are all victims of discrimination. Woman A (Elif Ürse) conceals her hair with a headscarf as a way of carrying on her mother’s tradition. Memorizing prayers, that was child’s play for her. Then, all at once, wearing a headscarf at school was forbidden: Muslima or atheist, she doesn’t know what to believe anymore.

Woman B (Yelda Baskın) is equally divided. “Who am I, what am I?” she asks. Her father is Turkish, her mother has a Kurdish background. No one can tell this when they look at her siblings, but she stands out like a dirty stain on her family’s clean record. Her skin is too dark, her eyes pitch black. The Turkish children used to avoid her because their parents taught them that Kurds are wild and dangerous – uncivilized cave dwellers. And then there is woman C (Gülce Uğurlu), who loves women instead of men and has known this from the time she was a little girl. Back then, she confided in her mother, but the latter panicked and sent her daughter to the doctor.

Patchwork identities

With a few cleverly utilized devices, director Maral Ceranoğlu is able to illustrate the women’s inner conflicts, their searches for identity and their resulting alienation from society. Each time one of them tells her story, the other two team up against her. But the constellations are always changing: It is impossible to understand all the correlations or to get a clear idea of who is friend and who is foe. Each current narrator is taunted – she is either surrounded, pushed, attacked or ignored by the others. And yet no matter how serious or threatening the situations get, the performers are able to create an ambivalent, comic atmosphere by exaggerating the spiteful, nagging roles and playing them with a good deal of irony.

Especially Elif Ürse demonstrates comedic talent as she gestures and snorts in the role of the conservative, exceedingly snide Turkish woman. Thus, the audience watches as the three women totter back and forth between the extremes of “conformity” and “rebellion” without being overwhelmed by the play’s depressing subject. This is also reflected in the costumes, which are patchwork compositions of various pieces of material: A’s flowered dress and simple coat, B’s monochromatic dress with multicolored patches, C’s trousers that somehow also look like a skirt.

A despised birthmark

They are alienated for something beyond their control, for a quality, a feeling, a characteristic that they were born with. The three women feel like ugly human-lings just like the character of the ugly duckling from the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, who was much too big and clumsy and not as pretty yellow as his siblings, but rather gray and sad-looking. In the fairy tale, the mother duck notices the differences as soon as her chick hatches, and is deeply unhappy. Though she loves all of her children, she does not treat them equally. The ugly duckling suffers from her lack of affection as well as from the ridicule and abuse it endures from its siblings. At the end of Andersen’s story, the ugly duckling turns into a beautiful swan. This is not the case in “The Ugly Human-ling,” as the women’s problems cannot be solved so easily; they are still unable to integrate into society, they still face antagonism and prejudice. The play ends with a ludicrous description of the modern Turkish woman.

“She uses everything she’s got to her advantage, is very social, lives in the city and is beautiful. The modern Turkish woman is married, has a high income and is a good housewife. She is completely liberated, she can go wherever she wants whenever she wants. She doesn’t dare take a step without her husband’s consent. She always knows exactly who she is. … She is secular when necessary, religious when required. The modern woman is nonpolitical.” The five young women from Istanbul who make up oyun deposu are anything but nonpolitical. They hold up a mirror to society – and not just Turkish society. Is the West really more advanced? Which prejudices have continued to exist until modern times? oyun deposu stands for self-confidence, tolerance, diversity and cooperation. For modern times that are truly modern.