Paperback / softback
ISBN:
9780889227576
Pages: 80
Pub. Date:
May 15 2012
Dimensions: 8.5" x 5.5" x 0.25"
Rights: Available: WORLD
Categories
Drama / DRA014000
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.
"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