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.
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.
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.