About
the Play:
The Trigger is a full-length drama by Carmen Aguirre.
Based on her own experience before, during, and after her rape,
Carmen Aguirre's play The Trigger is a testament to the
resilience and triumph of the human spirit and its ability to
transcend even the most horrible and terrifying of circumstances.
The Trigger stages Carmen Aguirre's own experience
before, during, and after her rape, with other characters'
perspectives interjected throughout. Five female cast members slide
between roles: one woman plays both the central character, Carmen,
and her male rapist; the rest play Carmen's cousin and companion
during the rape, the policemen who interrogate her, the nurse who
cursorily cares for her, her father, her later lovers.
The play
includes an authorial preface that states, "When I was thirteen
I was raped by the Paper Bag Rapist. I was with my younger cousin at
the time, and neither one of us ever saw him – he used a paper bag
to cover his own head or those of his victims. Not that we would have
seen him anyway; a gun was held to the backs of our heads and if we
turned around he'd kill us. He only had one bullet left, he said, so
he'd have to chop up my cousin while I watched, then shoot me. By the
time the attack was over and we were left lying in the mud, we were
both different people. I had wanted to write a play about this experience for years;
propelled by my anger at how often rape was portrayed in a
titillating, shocking, gratuitous way on screen or stage. Rapists
were evil and the victims were only that: victims.
But, how would I stage it? How would I tell the story? Why would I
tell this story? After a decade of chewing over these questions, the
image of a young tree lying on its side came to me. A man was
chopping an axe through its centre. A girl in a harness spun out of
control above him. The sound of their breathing filled the space. The
seed for The Trigger was planted.
The Trigger is for the 170 victims of the Paper Bag Rapist,
their families, the communities affected by this predator, and every
human being who has ever been sexually violated and lives with that
experience in their core, which comes to the surface in intimate
relationships, because, let's face it, when one is raped, there is
physical intimacy with the attacker. The Trigger deals with
the ripples of this kind of violation."
The Trigger premiered in 2005 at the Vancouver East
Cultural Centre in Vancouver as part of the PuSh International
Performing Arts Festival.
Cast: 5 female (doubling)
What people say:
"The Trigger
is a knockout… intelligent, powerful, funny, horrific,
theatrically stunning, and utterly free of victimology." —
Jerry Wasserman
"The writing is at its most
revealing when Aguirre shows us how the young Carmen's mind struggles
to process adult-scale horror…. Going into an evening like this,
you might expect sentimentalization of pain or oversimplification of
politics… what [The Trigger] offers is so
strange that it has the ring of truth, and it is never simplistic.
Often, though, it is beautiful." — Colin Thomas,
theatre critic, Georgia Straight
"…The Trigger,
sets us back in time with a beautifully genuine and forthright tale
of a young girl's adolescent years traumatised by violation. That
said, this play is also both funny and entertaining, while at the
same time a compelling social commentary on the experiences of many
young women." — The Peak
About the Playwright:
Carmen Aguirre is a Chilean-born Canadian author, actor,
and playwright who has worked extensively in North and South America.
The founder of the Latino Theatre Group in 1994 and more recently a
co-founder of the Canadian Latinx Theatre Artist Coalition (CALTAC), she is
now a Core Artist at Vancouver's Electric Company Theatre. She is a
prolific playwright whose works include The Refugee Hotel and
Anywhere But Here. As an actor, she has over eighty film,
television, and stage acting credits.
