Uncovering Paradoxes: Playwright Kelly Stuart’s Narrative Journey

Stuart also visited Van and described the city as “one of the darkest places I had seen.” While visiting an archaeological museum there, she discovered a section of the museum devoted to “the genocide of the Armenians against the Turks,” which contained displays of skulls and signs proclaiming that the skulls belonged to Turkish villagers killed by Armenians.

“It was such a revolting display — so disrespectful to the dead. I did not know what to do with my anger, or how to mask it,” said Stuart. She would come to realize that many of those living in Turkey have to live among such violent tributes and are subjected to these dark narratives.

She received a travel grant from the Jerome Foundation to write about Kurdish Dengbêj singers, focusing on the role of language and music in Anatolia. The difficulty of constructing narratives that truly embodied the people and experiences she witnessed in Turkey were a challenge for Stuart. “I had almost given up on theatre because I didn’t feel I could translate the experiences I was having onto the stage.”

While traveling with dramaturg Amy Wegener and researching for “Shadow Language,” Stuart visited Diyarbakir, Bingol and Dersim. “I had become interested in the history of Dersim — a place that Ataturk had once said was ‘A boil that must be lanced.’ It was once populated by Armenians as well as Alevi Kurds […].” It was this “continuing obsession” with Dersim that eventually led Stuart to write “Belonging to the Sky.”

Stuart said she was determined to understand why the people of Dersim had migrated to an Alevi village. It was during this search that an unnamed Turkish historian introduced Stuart to a story she hadn’t heard before. The story was of Ataturk adopting an Armenian orphan named Hatun. It was Stuart’s first exposure to the history of Gokçen, the famous Turkish female fighter pilot celebrated for her bombing of Dersim, and popularized by Dink, prior to his death in 2007.

“I became haunted by Sabhia Gokçen’s story — and reading Hrant Dink’s account of her life she embraces Turkish nationalism completely, she bombs the region of her own people, she could never show people her Armenian identity, and yet she knew who she was, and even secretly gave money to a nephew who came to find her from Lebanon in the years when she was an old lady,” said Stuart. “She was the icon of Turkish nationalism, but she was ‘the enemy.’ I wondered what did she have to do, to keep the grief and ‘the enemy’ of her own history at bay, in order to reap the benefits of being part of the new Turkey.”

As to the narrative connection between Gokçen and Dink, Stuart said, “These two people never met, but their stories were interwoven, and so my play is each of them telling their story, and little by little beginning to recognize the presence of the other.”

For Stuart, this dedication to Gokçen and Dink’s stories has made receiving the ADAA’s Saroyan Prize for “Belonging to the Sky” all the more meaningful.

“It was incredibly moving, a really important thing for me. I’ve been writing about this thing that for most Americans is quite obscure, but I have to write this, and I want Americans to understand the situation — in a human way — because a change in our policies could help the situation of people a great deal.”

She added, “Right now we are supporting the most oppressive policies, the jailing of thousands of people for thought crimes, the absurd denial of history and the facts of the Genocide.”

According to Stuart, the presence of Armenian community members and families of Genocide survivors at the ADAA ceremony was equally rewarding. “Usually when I present my work I have so much explaining to do to contextualize what I am writing about but the night of the ADAA event, I spent the entire evening listening to people’s family stories, and there was nothing I had to explain, they understood what I was writing about, and even though I am not Armenian, I understood them,” she said.

Stuart teaches playwriting in the MFA Theatre Program at the SoA. “Our students are incredibly talented, they’re an inspiration,” she said. “They are also very diverse and they teach me as much as I teach them.”

Stuart is currently working on several projects. “I’m writing a kind of memoir/theatre piece about my travels in Turkey that uses a lot of the video I have shot there, and I’m working on a new play.” She has recently worked on several short digital video pieces. “I’ve made several short pieces documenting music and culture — Kurdish music, Alevi music and right now I’m working on more ‘New York’ pieces that are both narrative and abstract.” She added, “I’m planning to do more of a narrative feature this summer — a comedy about a man who finds a lost cat.”