Stage Left, Spotlight On: The Turkish Trans Artists Rewriting the Rules of American Theater

There's a moment in Defne Yıldız's one-woman show — somewhere between a whirling dervish spin and a lip-sync breakdown to a Sezen Aksu ballad — when the audience at a Brooklyn experimental theater collective goes completely, breathlessly silent. Then they erupt. That silence, Defne will tell you later over çay she brewed backstage on a small electric kettle she carries everywhere, that silence is the whole point.

"American audiences don't know what to do with me at first," she laughs, pulling her embroidered kaftan tighter around her shoulders. "And I love that. I want them to not know. Because then they actually look."

Defne is part of a small but growing cohort of Turkish transgender and gender-nonconforming performers who have been quietly — and sometimes very loudly — reshaping what queer performance looks like on American stages. They're landing in off-Broadway houses, downtown experimental spaces, regional theater festivals, and increasingly, in rooms that have historically been very difficult to get into.

A Cultural Language All Their Own

What makes these performers distinctive isn't just their identity — it's the specific cultural vocabulary they bring with them. Turkish aesthetics are layered, contradictory, and ancient in ways that Western theater hasn't fully reckoned with. Think Ottoman miniature painting meets contemporary drag. Think the emotional register of a Turkish soap opera filtered through the political urgency of queer protest art.

Artist and theater-maker Tarık Demirci, who performs under the name Tarık Gece (gece meaning "night" in Turkish), relocated from Ankara to New York five years ago and has since built a devoted following in the city's downtown performance scene. His work blends Turkish shadow puppetry — the centuries-old Karagöz tradition — with trans narratives that feel both ancient and urgently contemporary.

"Karagöz is already queer," Tarık explains, referencing the traditional comic character who has long been read through a gender-subversive lens by Turkish scholars. "I'm not inventing anything new. I'm just being honest about what was always there."

His most recent piece, Gece Yarısı (Midnight), ran for three weeks at a Lower East Side venue and sold out every night. Critics called it "disorienting in the best possible way" and "unlike anything currently happening in New York theater." Tarık printed that second quote on a T-shirt.

The Challenges Are Real — And They're Specific

For all the artistic breakthroughs, the path for Turkish trans performers in the US is genuinely complicated. Visa restrictions, language barriers, and the constant pressure to explain your culture and your gender identity simultaneously can be exhausting in ways that don't always make it into the glowing reviews.

"I'm always doing double translation," says Leyla Arslan, a gender-nonconforming dancer and choreographer from İzmir who has worked with several prominent American contemporary dance companies. "I'm translating Turkish culture for Americans, and I'm also translating what it means to be trans in Turkey — which is completely different from being trans in the US — for queer Americans who think they already understand my experience."

Leyla points out that visibility in Turkey for trans people, particularly trans women, has historically been concentrated in specific, often marginalized spaces — nightlife, sex work, certain neighborhoods in Istanbul like Beyoğlu. That history, she argues, is both a burden and a source of profound artistic power.

"The trans women who came before me in Turkey survived in ways that were extraordinary. They built community under incredible pressure. That's in my body when I dance. That's in everything I make."

Finding Community, Building Bridges

One unexpected development in recent years has been the formation of informal networks connecting Turkish LGBTQ+ performers across American cities. In New York, a loose collective has been meeting monthly — sometimes at someone's apartment in Astoria, sometimes in the back room of a Midtown café — to share resources, workshop new material, and simply exist together in a language and cultural context that feels like home.

"We're not an organization," Defne clarifies with a grin. "We're just people who need to eat börek and complain about auditions in Turkish sometimes."

But the impact of that community is real. Several collaborations have emerged from those gatherings, including a bilingual theater piece currently in development that explores the experience of queer Turkish immigrants across three generations.

American producers and casting directors are starting to pay attention, too. A handful of Turkish trans performers have been approached for mainstream projects — television pilots, regional theater productions, even a Broadway developmental lab. The interest is real, though it comes with its own complications.

"Sometimes they want me to be the 'Turkish thing,'" Tarık says, making air quotes with his fingers. "Like, they want the aesthetic but they don't want the politics. They want the beauty without the history. And I'm not interested in that."

What's Coming Next

The momentum feels real and it feels like it's building. Leyla has a residency at a prestigious American dance institution lined up for next spring. Defne is in early conversations about bringing her one-woman show to a larger venue. Tarık is developing a new piece that he describes only as "very long, very loud, and very Turkish."

For US audiences who haven't yet encountered this work, the entry points are growing. Queer arts festivals in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles have been increasingly programming Turkish and broader MENA LGBTQ+ performers. Following these artists on social media — where they document their work, their lives, and their ongoing navigation of two very different worlds — is another way in.

Mostly, though, the invitation is simple: show up, sit down, and let yourself be surprised. That silence Defne describes — the one before the eruption — is available to anyone willing to be in the room.

And if you're lucky, there might be çay.