About
the Play:
Blue Box is a full-length comedic drama by Carmen
Aguirre. This funny,
sexual and deeply political one-woman show is an intimate and sensual
story of love, lust and revolution. Based on writer and performer
Carmen Aguirre’s remarkable life, Blue Box
is a story of terror and romance that takes you from the Chilean
resistance movement during Pinochet’s dictatorship to a passionate
affair with a Hollywood TV star to present-day Vancouver.
Blue Box is a former Chilean revolutionary's one-woman dark
comedy about unconditional love and the tension between revolutionary
love and love for oneself. 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, Aguirre's
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. Funny, sensual, and moving, Blue Box
reveals a woman committed to a cause for which she would have
sacrificed everything, and committed to a man who refused to
sacrifice anything for anyone.
Blue Box premiered in 2012 at The Cultch in East Vancouver
as part of a national tour produced in association to Ottawa,
Victoria, Calgary and Toronto.
Cast: 1 woman
What people say:
"…raw, courageously honest
and funny; an insightful journey into the formation of a
revolutionary soul." — Globe and Mail
"The play pivots on the
fascinating contradictory impulses in this one person: the selfishness
of sexual passion versus the selflessness of passionate
revolutionary commitment. A good storyteller, Aguirre runs the full
gamut of emotion." — Vancouver Province
"There's a clear,
sophisticated intelligence at work here. The script is riddled with
both serious and ironic political references." — Georgia
Straight
"A storytelling
tour-de-force…." — Fast Forward Weekly
"She has the force of a
hurricane. Aguirre deals in love instead of destruction." —
Mooney on Theatre
"Blue Box is an unapologetic
story of power, told with power. Its narrative bathes in it, bemoans
the loss of it, fights it and fears it." — Monday
Magazine
"A night of vivid
storytelling…." — Calgary Herald
"Vivid tapestry of love, loss
and desperation." — West of West
About the Playwright:
Carmen Aguirre is a Vancouver-based theatre artist who has
worked extensively in North and South America. She has written and
co-written fourteen plays. As an actor, Aguirre has over thirty film
and TV credits, including a lead role in the independent feature
Quinceañera, winner of the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience
Award at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, an Independent Spirit
award, GLAAD awards and various People's Choice awards at festivals
around the world. As a stage actor, Aguirre has worked with a host of
acclaimed Vancouver theatre companies. Aguirre was the founder and
director of The Latino Theatre Group, was playwright-in-residence at
The Vancouver Playhouse from 2000 to 2002, was
playwright-in-residence at Touchstone Theatre in 2004, and
facilitates Theatre of the Oppressed workshops around British
Columbia.