About the Play:

Chile Con Carne and Other Early Works is a collection of three full-length dramas by Carmen Aguirre. With perceptive, unflinching wit, these three early plays from the award-winning Chilean Canadian writer document the hardships, horrors, and heartache of exile, revealing the far-reaching effects of dictatorial violence and terror. Her funny, poignant, and biting explorations of refuge and recovery are as pertinent now as when they were first written. Highlighting the fresh perspective refugees bring to North American society, Chile Con Carne and Other Early Works also provides essential context for her more recent plays.

Chile Con Carne is a darkly comic, semi-autobiographical 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 of Chile's Pinochet regime in mid 1970s Vancouver. (Premiered in 1999 at Factory Studio Theatre in Toronto; Cast: 1 woman)

What people say:

"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

¿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.

What people say:

"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

In a Land Called I Don't Remember is an autobiographical piece that takes place entirely on a bus in the Andes mountains, crossing from Argentina into Chile. The author explores her dual identities of Chilean and Canadian, personified by two female characters who were the same age and sit next to each other. Written while she was attending theatre school, her first play received its premiere in 1995 at Studio 58 in Vancouver to critical acclaim.

About the Playwright:

Carmen Aguirre is a Chilean-Canadian author, actor, and playwright, a Core Artist at Vancouver's Electric Company Theatre, who has worked extensively in North and South America. She has written and co-written over twenty plays. As an actor, she has over eighty film, television, and stage acting credits.