About the Play:

Contains two full-length dramas by Guillermo Verdecchia: Another Country about a woman's discovery that her husband has been involved in political torture in Argentina, and bloom about hope flowering in the midst of destruction. Together these plays constitute an unsparing interrogation of a world perpetually at war.

Another Country is a political thriller based, in part, on Amnesty International transcripts of tortured prisoners and families of "the disappeared." The play follows a few days in the lives of characters on both sides of the bars and the ominous questions are "What did you know and when did you know it?" It was written as the author's response to his home country Argentina's Dirty War in 1976-83, when leaders of the military junta held that their campaign against "leftist subversives and terrorists" was the beginning of the third world war. The scale of their undertaking was defined by their statement: "First we will kill all the subversives; then, their collaborators; later, those who sympathize with them; afterward, those who remain indifferent; and finally, those who are undecided." The public relations firm Burson-Marsteller was hired to make Argentina look good while the junta (trained in counter-insurgency at the U.S.-based and funded School of the Americas, or The School of the Coups as it's known in Latin America) and its collaborators reorganized the nation. (Premiered under its original title War at Calgary's Alberta Theatre Projects where it was remounted under the title Final Decisions at in 1990; Cast: 3 women, 2 men)

bloom is about a war orphan and a war veteran who live on the fringes of a ruined world – one is trying to remember, while the other is trying to forget. Inspired by T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, the title is taken from a line in Paul Celan's poem, Psalm: "we bloom in thy spite". bloom is a humorous and haunting story of despair and hope played out between the old man with a decaying soul, and the boy who may bear the seeds of his redemption. (Premiered at Toronto's The Theatre Centre in 2006; Cast: 2 women, 4 men)

What people say:

"Verdecchia … know[s] how to modulate emotional tones beautifully … bloom is a poetic look at a world where hope must grow in sandy soil." — NOW

About the Playwright:

Guillermo Verdecchia is a Canadian writer of drama, fiction, and film, as well as a director and actor. He is the recipient of a Governor-General's Award for Drama for his play Fronteras Americanas and a four-time winner of the Chalmers Canadian Play Award. His work has translated into Spanish and Italian, produced in Europe, Australia, and the US, and is studied in Latin America, Europe, and North America. As a director and actor he has worked at theatres across Canada, from the Stratford Festival to the Vancouver East Cultural Centre.