“Our story takes place in the Kıyıkışlacık region of the Aegean, with its abundance of blue, green, and fragrant scents. Yeraz, who attends forest school, has only one wish: to be left alone at home so he can prove to everyone that he’s grown up… But where’s that luck! When he learns that his mother is going on a business trip and that his grandmother will be staying with him over the weekend, all his dreams go down the drain. On top of that, he doesn’t even have enough photos for the school’s photo exhibition. Is everything going wrong? And why is everyone in this house so bo-oooring!
When Yeraz is late for her walk in the woods, she finds herself unwittingly caught up in an adventure. The house she comes across at the end of the trail, her new friend Yosun, Yosun’s grandmother who has trouble remembering things, the rice paddy bird, mushrooms, pinecones, the wonderful scent of the forest, and so much more… And of course, there’s a magical diary whose origin and destination are a mystery: *Caniko*.
After briefly recalling our story, let’s hear from our author, Nevra Nergiz, about the journey from book to stage…
“As we brought the novel *Treasures of the Forest* from the pages of a book to the stage, the principles we kept reminding ourselves of actually formed the very dynamics of Inspera Children’s Theater. For the backstage team, the formula was crystal clear. We had a story that was naive, perhaps even romantic, joyful, and heartwarming. Without worrying about delivering a message, we had to breathe life into this story and bring it to life. We focused on conveying our message without lecturing. We strove to create a performance that was cohesive, grounded, inspiring, creatively robust, and innovative.
That’s why our script had to be rock-solid. When we finally held our script in our hands after a creative process of about two months, we had taken another step closer to our dream.
The number of characters, our settings, and our key moments in the play had been determined. While we tried not to stray from the atmosphere of the book, we used the magical visual appeal of theater to create new creative spaces for ourselves. In our opening scene, we introduced the audience to the room we created from a maze-like arrangement of boxes of various sizes—which allowed us to portray Yeraz’s anxiety, emotional fluctuations, and frantic movements more convincingly—as well as the kitchen, the novel’s indispensable meeting point. The journey Yeraz embarks on and the forest she ultimately reaches came to life on stage through a fantastical, ethereal, and fairy-tale-like set design. Certain descriptions from the novel appeared in the play—sometimes as colors, sometimes as textures…
“After a while, Yeraz’s ears began to hear other things—the sounds of the forest. For example, she compared the sound the leaves made as they brushed against one another to the applause rising in a massive opera house after a performance had ended. The hoot of the owl he passed beneath sounded to his ears like the breath of an elderly man taking a deep breath. As he walked, he even found a rhythm in his sneakers sinking lightly into the mud and then emerging again. As for the forest’s color today, it was undeniably brown. In just two days, the greens and yellows had vanished. All the colors he’d seen on the color chart his mother occasionally brought home were right there before him, just like a painting: chestnut, chocolate, sand, straw, tan…”
Yosun’s home—formed in a matter of seconds by the players’ movements—instantly made us feel, right down to our very bones, the pastoral atmosphere the book was trying to convey with these very words.
The element we were most delighted to see come to life, of course, was the honeyed, hazelnut-filled, and milk-rich marlenka! As one of the story’s central elements—symbolizing family, friendship, and the connection between tradition and modernity—we simply had to bring the marlenka to the stage! The delicious marlenka dessert—which came out of Yeraz’s bag and was baked by her grandmother—whetted the appetites not only of Yosun and her grandmother but also of the audience…
If you’re curious, stop by Voyn Bistro after the show to try a piece.”
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