Six years after fleeing the 1973 military coup in Chile, eleven-year-old Carmen Aguirre and her family return 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 with the ever-present fear of capture and torture, Carmen realizes the sacrifices she who unconditionally loves the cause must make.
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, Aguirre's sexy, fast-paced, and darkly comic monologue ultimately asks: Between the extremes of love for the political cause and love for another, how and where does one create space for self-love?
"A storytelling tour-de-force". - Fast Forward Weekly, Calgary, Canada
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Based on her own experience as a rape victim, Carmen Aguirre's play The Trigger is a testament to the resilience and triumph of the human spirit and its ability to transcend even the most horrible and terrifying of circumstances.
"The Trigger is a knockout... intelligent, powerful, funny, horrific, theatrically stunning, and utterly free of victimology". - The Province, Vancouver, Canada.
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Chile Con Carne is a darkly comic one-woman show on the theme of exile, culture shock, and internalized racism from the point of view of a Chilean eight-year-old refugee in mid 1970s Vancouver.
"Carmen Aguirre's witty, semi-autobiographical monologue about growing up as a refugee of Chile's Pinochet regime, vividly captures the feelings of a child torn between two worlds." - The Globe and Mail.
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Set in a run-down hotel in 1974, only months after the start of the infamous Pinochet regime, eight Chilean refugees struggle, at times haplessly, at times profoundly, to decide if fleeing their homeland means they have abandoned their friends and responsibilities or not.
Laid bare in the fictionalized autobiographical details of this Jessie Award-winning play 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 survivor – even the tragedy of surviving the nightmares of the past only to have them return to challenge any hope of the future.
"Full of wonder and terror... the battle between courage and cowardice looms large here; duty to one's self or to one's people is a constant internal compromise... humourous... heartbreaking." - EYE Weekly, Toronto, Canada.
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¿QUE PASA with LA RAZA, eh?, based on the experiences of The Latino Theatre Group, with whom this play was co-written, centres on the complex lives of a group of young Latinos in Vancouver. In the play, a young woman must decide how to confront the man she recognizes from her childhood in Guatemala - one of the secret police members who "disappeared" her parents.
"When we think about the culture of Las Americas, con acento, Canada rarely comes to mind. However, the recent moving premiere of ¿QUE PASA with LA RAZA, eh? by The Latino Theatre Group, located Vancouver, British Columbia on both the cultural and geographical map of Nuestra America" - Theatre Journal (U.S.)
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Carmen's first play, written in her mid-twenties, In a Land Called I Don't Remember is set entirely on a bus carrying a disparate group of Chileans back to their homeland from Argentina, exploring the highs and lows of exile. This play was produced in 1995 at Carmen's alma mater, Studio 58, Langara College, in Vancouver. It was finally published in 2019. If you are interested in buying this play click here:
https://talonbooks.com/books/chile-con-carne-and-other-early-works
