|
We accept PayPal, Visa & Mastercard
through our secure checkout.
|
The Refugee Hotel
The Refugee Hotel
|
Author: Carmen Aguirre Publisher: Talonbooks Format: Softcover # of Pages: 128 Pub. Date: 2010 ISBN-10: 889226504 ISBN-13: 9780889226500
|
About the Play:
The Refugee Hotel is a play 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. More than a dark comedy about a group of Chilean refugees who arrive in Vancouver after Pinochet's coup, this play is Carmen Aguirre's attempt to give voice to refugee communities from all corners of the globe.
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.
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 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. |
|
|
|