Calling the Tune
Musician Seval Okyay saves the day for “No Longer Without You”
By Ali Raj
“No Longer With You,” the Dutch theater-maker Adelheid Roosen’s first New York presentation in a decade, bluntly stages the conflict between a modern Turkish-Dutch woman (Nazmiye Oral) and her traditional Turkish mother (Havva Oral). As the daughter recites her immigrant mother’s offenses, it is Seval Okyay’s music that lends the performance texture and subtlety — otherwise lacking in the script.
Perched cross-legged on a raised platform on one side of the performance space, Okyay plays the saz, a long-necked lute native to Turkic countries. This she intermittently switches to a frame drum — the only instrument not forbidden in fundamental Islam. This pairing up of secular tradition and religious observance is evident not only in form but also in content. Okyay sings folk tunes and also croons the Salawat — a phrasal invocation calling for blessings on the Prophet of Islam and his family. At the same time, Nazmiye questions her mother’s adherence to religious decrees. The music accentuates this very conflict.
Okyay’s singing punctuates the dialogue, demarcating one episode in Nazmiye’s life from another and helping the conversation progress. Nazmiye shouts, giggles, and whispers, passionately presenting her case to her mother. The mother, on the other hand, responds in an apologetic, apathetic “it-is-what-it-is” tone. Havva has raised her children in The Netherlands, bearing a lot of financial and emotional hardships. Her stage character, however, does not reflect that depth, and the exchanges between the two women become repetitive. In the background, Okyay supplies joyous strumming patterns, anxious shredding, and delicate picking that save the event from monotony.
In a conversation after the performance, Okyay explained that many of the show’s songs were composed by anonymous women years ago, and passed on from one generation to another. These Turkish folk tunes concern various subjects — the death of a male family member, weddings. As Nazmiye keeps freely questioning why society claims ownership over her body and jurisdiction over her choices, Okyay communicates the same anguish through the songs, just as Turkish women have done for centuries.
Annoyed by a microphone cable that got entangled with her undergarment as the conversation was underway the night I caught the show, Nazmiye passed on the job of translating Havva’s lines into English to Okyay, who for the rest of the performance juggled gamely between her two responsibilities.
At each performance, Okyay begins playing long before the play proper starts. As members of the audience trickle into the well-lit venue, strewn with pillows for audience members to sit on, she softly plucks the strings of her saz. She hums under her breath a soothing melody, the words of which are difficult to pick up, yet one wishes for the song to never end.
It isn’t long before she has everyone’s attention. The chatter drowns into the tune, never to return until the end of the show. Okyay toys with volume, eyes shut, wearing a wide smile on her face. It is as if she is playing to a breeze in a balcony. This intimate aural experience eases the audience into what is to be an intimate affair — a conversation between a mother and a daughter in a living room about “unspeakable subjects.”
Throughout the show’s 90-minute runtime, it’s Okyay who draws us in.
