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.
Carmen Aguirre is an award-winning theatre artist and author who has written and co-written over twenty-five plays, including Chile Con Carne, The Refugee Hotel, The Trigger, Blue Box, Broken Tailbone, and Anywhere but Here, as well as the #1 national bestseller Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter (winner of CBC Canada Reads 2012), and its bestselling sequel, Mexican Hooker #1 and My Other Roles Since the Revolution.
Carmen is currently writing an adaptation of Euripides's Medea for Vancouver's Rumble Theatre, and Molière's The Learned Ladies for Toronto's Factory Theatre. She is a Core Artist at Electric Company Theatre, a co-founding member of the Canadian Latinx Theatre Artist Coalition (CALTAC), and has over eighty film, TV, and stage acting credits, including her award-winning lead role in the Canadian premiere of Stephen Adley Guirgis's The Motherfucker with the Hat, and her Leo-nominated lead performance in the independent feature film Bella Ciao! She is a graduate of Studio 58. carmenaguirre.ca
"The play pivots on the fascinating contradictory impulses in this one person: the selfishness of sexual passion versus the selflessness of passionate revolutionary commitment. A good storyteller, Aguirre runs the full gamut of emotion."
- Vancouver Province
"Vivid tapestry of love, loss and desperation."
- West of West
"A night of vivid storytelling ..."
- Calgary Herald
"Blue Box is an unapologetic story of power, told with power. Its narrative bathes in it, bemoans the loss of it, fights it and fears it."
- Monday Magazine
"She has the force of a hurricane. Aguirre deals in love instead of destruction."
- Mooney on Theatre