Blue Box

By Carmen Aguirre

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.

In this sexy, fast-paced, and darkly comic follow-up to her acclaimed autobiography, Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter, Aguirre ultimately asks: Between the extremes of love for the political cause and love for another, how and where does one create space for self-love?

Cast of 1 woman.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Release date: May 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9780889227583

Carmen Aguirre

Carmen Aguirre is a Vancouver-based theatre artist who has worked extensively in North and South America. She has written and co-written twenty-one plays, including Chile Con Carne, The Trigger, The Refugee Hotel, and Blue Box. Her first non-fiction book, Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter, was published in 2011 by Douglas & McIntyre in Canada and Granta/Portobello in the United Kingdom and is now available in Finland and Holland, in translation. Something Fierce was nominated for British Columbia’s National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, the international Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction, was a finalist for the 2012 BC Book Prize, was selected by the Globe and Mail, Quill & Quire, and the National Post as one of the best books of 2011, was named Book of the Week by BBC Radio in the United Kingdom, won CBC Canada Reads 2012, and is a number-one national bestseller. Aguirre has more than sixty film, TV, and stage acting credits, is a Theatre of the Oppressed workshop facilitator, and an instructor in the acting department at Vancouver Film School. She received the Union of B.C. Performers 2011 Lorena Gale Woman of Distinction Award, the 2012 Langara College Outstanding Alumnae Award, and has been nominated for the Jessie Richardson Theatre Award, the Dora Mavor Moore Award, and the prestigious Siminovitch Prize. Aguirre is a graduate of Studio 58.

Book preview

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Contents

Cover

Acknowledgements

Production History

Performance Notes

Prologue

ACT ONE

ACT TWO

About the Playwright

Copyright

To the courage and passion of youth.

I stand in awe of it.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts for an individual writing grant that enabled me to write this play. I would also like to thank the Banff Playwrights Colony, which provided me with time and space to write the first draft.

Further thanks to Alameda Theatre Company in Toronto, the Playwrights Theatre Centre in Vancouver, Alberta Theatre Projects in Calgary, Buddies in Bad Times in Toronto, and Neworld Theatre in Vancouver for producing staged readings of the play in its different stages of development; to the Great Canadian Theatre Company in Ottawa for producing a workshop production of the play in its final draft; and to Aluna Theatre and Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto, Intrepid Theatre in Victoria, and the Magnetic North Festival in Calgary for hosting the first tour of Blue Box.

I would like to thank Neworld Theatre and the Vancouver East Cultural Centre in Vancouver for co-producing the world premiere of Blue Box. And, most importantly, thank you to Nightswimming Theatre in Toronto for commissioning this piece and providing dramaturgical and directorial support throughout its entire process, all the way through to the world premiere, which they co-produced.

I am forever grateful to Brian Quirt and Rupal Shah for their endless support, good cheer, keen eye, all-around brilliance, and service to Canadian theatre. I, and the play, would be lost without them.

Production History

Commissioned and developed by Nightswimming Theatre, Toronto, in association with Neworld Theatre, Vancouver, Blue Box premiered on May 2, 2012, at the Vancity Culture Lab at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre.

CARMEN

Carmen Aguirre

Director and Dramaturge

Brian Quirt

Production Designer

Itai Erdal

Sound Designer and Composer

Joelysa Pankanea

Stage Manager and Production Manager

Robin Richardson

Wardrobe Consultant

Carmen Alatorre

Producer

Rupal Shah

Associate Producer

Kirsty Munro

Performance Notes

There is no fourth wall. The performer creates an intimate relationship with the audience by making as much eye contact with ­audience members as possible. The performer must not play a part; she must be herself. It should seem as though she’s making up the text on the spot.

The text is to be performed with no transitions. There is one true beat and two pauses in the entire play, as indicated in the text.

There is no intermission.

Salsa music plays full-blast as the audience enters the theatre.

A stool is placed upstage centre.

The house lights remain up at a low level throughout the performance. The stage is fully lit.

If not for love,

then why?

Prologue

Ese Hombre by La India starts to play.

CARMEN enters and stands downstage centre, no more than three feet away from the first row of the audience.

CARMEN:

Hi, everyone! Thanks for coming to Blue Cunt. That’s the name of the show. I know you thought it was Blue Box, but it’s actually Blue Cunt. The thing is that no one could ever publicize a show with the words Blue Cunt all over the posters. Anyway. Blue Box, Blue Cunt: same thing. Thanks for coming.

Now, I know you’re probably all geniuses of geography, but just in case, I thought I’d give you a quick lesson. Today we are going to focus on South America, which is shaped kind of like an ice cream cone. We are going to look specifically at the cone part, which is referred to as the Southern Cone. Chile and Argentina are in the Southern Cone. They border each