Read more
With perceptive, unflinching wit, these three early plays from award-winning Chilean Canadian writer Carmen Aguirre document the hardships, horrors, and heartache of exile, revealing the far-reaching effects of dictatorial violence and terror.
About the author
Carmen Aguirre is an award-winning theatre artist and author who has written and co-written over twenty-five plays, including
Chile Con Carne,
The Refugee Hotel,
The Trigger,
Blue Box,
Broken Tailbone, and
Anywhere but Here, as well as the #1 national bestseller
Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter (winner of CBC Canada Reads 2012), and its bestselling sequel,
Mexican Hooker #1 and My Other Roles Since the Revolution.
Carmen is currently writing an adaptation of Euripides's
Medea for Vancouver's Rumble Theatre, and Molière's
The Learned Ladies for Toronto's Factory Theatre. She is a Core Artist at Electric Company Theatre, a co-founding member of the Canadian Latinx Theatre Artist Coalition (CALTAC), and has over eighty film, TV, and stage acting credits, including her award-winning lead role in the Canadian premiere of Stephen Adley Guirgis's
The Motherfucker with the Hat, and her Leo-nominated lead performance in the independent feature film
Bella Ciao! She is a graduate of Studio 58. carmenaguirre.ca
Summary
Three early plays from influential Canadian Latina playwright, Carmen Aguirre. The plays, Chile Con Carne, ¿QUE PASA with LA RAZA, eh?, and In a Land Called I Don’t Remember, deal with the experience of exile – the hardships, the heartache, and the horror – as well as revealing the fresh perspective refugees bring to North American society. Written in the 1990s, all three plays explore the far-reaching effects of the violence and terror the regime of now-ousted dictator Augusto Pinochet, still in power during the plays’ composition, inflicted on the Chilean population, both at home and abroad, effects explored in many of Aguirre’s award-winning later plays. These are impacts refugees cannot escape even when they manage to flee to physical safety; the plays’ explorations of refuge and recovery are as pertinent now as they were when they were first written.
