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The Refugee Hotel
The Refugee Hotel
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Author: Carmen Aguirre Publisher: Talonbooks Format: Softcover # of Pages: 128 Pub. Date: 2010 ISBN-10: 889226504 ISBN-13: 9780889226500
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About
the Play:
The Refugee Hotel is a full-length drama by Carmen
Aguirre. Set in a run-down hotel in 1974, only months after the
start of the infamous Pinochet regime, eight Chilean refugees
struggle, at times haplessly, at times profoundly, to decide if
fleeing their homeland means they have abandoned their friends and
responsibilities or not. Capturing the immigrant and exile experience
in Canada, this play is Carmen Aguirre's attempt to give voice
to refugee communities from all corners of the globe.
The Refugee Hotel is based on playwright Carmen
Aguirre's own experiences arriving in Canada with her parents
after the bloody 1973 military coup that toppled the government of
Salvador Allende in Chile. Two events gave birth to this play: the
1998 arrest of Augusto Pinochet by the Spanish courts and the 1995
death of Aguirre's uncle, who drank himself to death on Vancouver's
skid row, never living to make a victorious return to his country. It
has taken decades of silence for Aguirre to understand and come to
terms with her family's experience as refugees and exiles: "The
few times we spoke about it to other people, we were accused of being
pathological liars and being crazy," she says of those years.
"We learned never to talk about what was happening in Chile.
From the moment when I told some classmates very matter-of-factly in
grade two that my stepfather and some of my family members had just
come out of a concentration camp that was the national soccer
stadium, I was Crazy Carmen." Laid bare in the fictionalized
autobiographical details of The Refugee Hotel are the
universal truths the victims and survivors of political oppression
continue to experience everywhere: the terror of persecution, arrest
and torture; the exhausted elation of escape; the trauma of learning
to live again with the losses, betrayals and agonies of the past; the
irrational guilt of the survivor – even the tragedy of surviving
the nightmares of the past only to have them return to challenge any
hope of a future.
The Refugee Hotel premiered in 2009 at Theatre Passe
Muraille in Toronto. Since
then the play had regional premieres at professional theatres across
Canada
and has been performed in college theatre productions as a showcase
of student talent.
Cast: 5 women, 5 men, 3 others
What people say:
"A powerful new play."
— CBC Radio
"A humorous and heartbreaking
look at life in exile." — Mark Taper Forum (Los
Angeles)
"Four-star hotel ... This
moving, often engrossing play paints rich portraits of eight
refugees: some tortured, some fearful, all defiant ... a production
to catch for its theatrical strengths and historic insights ...
triumphant." — NOW magazine
"Full of wonder and terror ...
The battle between courage and cowardice looms large here; duty to
one's self or to one's people is a constant internal compromise ...
humorous ... heartbreaking." — EYE Weekly
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. |
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