The Playwrights Database
CARMEN AGUIRRE
Nationality: Chileanemail: n/a Website: n/a
Literary Agent: n/a
Carmen Aguirre is a Vancouver-based theatre artist who has worked extensively in North and South America. She has written and co-written twenty-one plays, including Chile Con Carne, The Trigger, The Refugee Hotel, and Blue Box. Her first non-fiction book, Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter, was published in 2011 by Douglas & McIntyre in Canada and Granta/Portobello in the United Kingdom and is now available in Finland and Holland, in translation. Something Fierce was nominated for British Columbias National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, the international Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction, was a finalist for the 2012 BC Book Prize, was selected by the Globe and Mail, Quill & Quire, and the National Post as one of the best books of 2011, was named Book of the Week by BBC Radio in the United Kingdom, won CBC Canada Reads 2012, and is a number-one national bestseller. Aguirre has more than sixty film, TV, and stage acting credits, is a Theatre of the Oppressed workshop facilitator, and an instructor in the acting department at Vancouver Film School. She received the Union of B.C. Performers 2011 Lorena Gale Woman of Distinction Award, the 2012 Langara College Outstanding Alumnae Award, and has been nominated for the Jessie Richardson Theatre Award, the Dora Mavor Moore Award, and the prestigious Siminovitch Prize. Aguirre is a graduate of Studio 58.
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below is a list of Carmen Aguirre's plays - click on a Play Title for more information
Blue Box Que Pasa With La Raza, Eh? Refugee Hotel, The Trigger, TheBlue Box
Six years after fleeing the 1973 military coup that overthrew Salvador Allende, the democratically elected, socialist leader of Chile, eleven-year-old Carmen Aguirre and her family return to South America to join the underground resistance. At eighteen, Carmen commits herself to the movement, running a safe house on the border between Chile and Argentina. Forfeiting her first marriage to the pressures of revolutionary life, and living for years with the ever-present fear of capture and torture for her opposition to the Pinochet regime, Aguirre realizes the sacrifices she who unconditionally loves the cause must make. When one is in the revolution, she says, having a personal life is an act of treason. Fifteen years later, in Los Angeles, Carmen once again unconditionally gives everything of herself for love of a different kind. She begins a sexually passionate but emotionally impossible relationship with a handsome Chicano TV star whom she pursues as relentlessly as she herself was once hunted. Emphasizing the tensions between these two modalities of loving, Aguirres monologue intercuts recollections of events that, although they are disconnected in time and space, together comprise two core stories that define her, and which she is challenged to reconcile.
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1st Published:
Talon Books (2013) >>> 978-0889227576
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Monologue play
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Male: - Female: 1 Other: -
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Top of PageQue Pasa With La Raza, Eh?
Synopsis:
a young woman must decide how to confront the man she recognizes from her childhood in Guatemalanone of the soldiers who 'disappeared her parents
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Play/Drama
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Male: - Female: - Other: -
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Top of PageRefugee Hotel, The
Two events gave birth to this play: the 1998 arrest of Augusto Pinochet by the Spanish courts and the 1995 death of Aguirres uncle, who drank himself to death on Vancouvers skid row, never living to make a victorious return to his country. It has taken decades of silence for Aguirre to understand and come to terms with her familys experience as refugees and exiles: The few times we spoke about it to other people, we were accused of being pathological liars and being crazy, she says of those years. We learned never to talk about what was happening in Chile. From the moment when I told some classmates very matter-of-factly in grade two that my stepfather and some of my family members had just come out of a concentration camp that was the national soccer stadium, I was Crazy Carmen. Laid bare in the ?ctionalized autobiographical details of The Refugee Hotel are the universal truths the victims and survivors of political oppression continue to experience everywhere: the terror of persecution, arrest and torture; the exhausted elation of escape; the trauma of learning to live again with the losses, betrayals and agonies of the past; the irrational guilt of the survivoreven the tragedy of surviving the nightmares of the past only to have them return to challenge any hope of a future.
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1st Published:
Talon Books (2013) >>> 978-0889226500
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To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies
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Genre:
Drama
Parts:
Male: - Female: - Other: -
Further Reference:
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Top of PageTrigger, The
When I was thirteen I was raped by the Paper Bag Rapist. I was with my younger cousin at the time, and neither one of us ever saw himhe used a paper bag to cover his own head or those of his victims. Not that we would have seen him anyway; a gun was held to the backs of our heads and if we turned around hed kill us. He only had one bullet left, he said, so hed have to chop up my cousin while I watched, then shoot me. By the time the attack was over and we were left lying in the mud, we were both different people. I had wanted to write a play about this experience for years; propelled by my anger at how often rape was portrayed in a titillating, shocking, gratuitous way on screen or stage. Rapists were evil and the victims were only that: victims. But, how would I stage it? How would I tell the story? Why would I tell this story? After a decade of chewing over these questions, the image of a young tree lying on its side came to me. A man was chopping an axe through its centre. A girl in a harness spun out of control above him. The sound of their breathing filled the space. The seed for The Trigger was planted. The Trigger is for the 170 victims of the Paper Bag Rapist, their families, the communities affected by this predator, and every human being who has ever been sexually violated and lives with that experience in their core, which comes to the surface in intimate relationships, because, lets face it, when one is raped, there is physical intimacy with the attacker.The Trigger deals with the ripples of this kind of violation.
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1st Published:
Talon Books (2013) >>> 978-0889225916
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To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies
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Genre:
One act
Parts:
Male: - Female: 5 Other: doubling
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