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    The Refugee Hotel
    The Refugee Hotel
    The Refugee Hotel
    Ebook120 pages48 minutes

    The Refugee Hotel

    By Carmen Aguirre

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    About this ebook

    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 ?ctionalized 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.

    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 ?eeing 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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTalonbooks
    Release dateAug 15, 2010
    ISBN9780889228221
    The Refugee Hotel
    Author

    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.

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      Book preview

      The Refugee Hotel - Carmen Aguirre

      The-Refugee-Hotel-cover.jpg15529.png

      Contents

      Cover

      Acknowledgements

      Synopsis

      Cast of Characters

      About the Set

      Prologue

      ACT ONE

      Scene One

      Scene Two

      Scene Three

      Scene Four

      Scene Five

      Scene Six

      Scene Seven

      Scene Eight

      Scene Nine

      Scene Ten

      Scene Eleven

      Scene Twelve

      ACT TWO

      Scene One

      Scene Two

      Scene Three

      Scene Four

      Scene Five

      Scene Six

      Scene Seven

      Scene Eight

      Scene Nine

      Scene Ten

      Scene Eleven

      Epilogue

      Other Books by Carmen Aguirre

      Copyright Information

      I return to the South, the way one always returns to love. I return to you, with my desire, with my fear. I carry the South like the destiny of my heart. I am of the South. I dream of the South, immense moon, upside down sky. I search for the South, for the open time and its aftermath. I love the South, its good people, its dignity. I feel the South, like your body in the dark. I love you, South.

      —Fernando Pino Solanas

      I am grateful to life, which has given me so much: two open eyes that allow me to distinguish the darkness from the light.

      —Violeta Parra

      They were nothing more than people, by themselves. Even paired, any pairing, they would have been nothing more than people by themselves. But all together, they have become the heart and muscles and mind of something perilous and new, something strange and growing and great.Together, all together, they are the instruments of change.

      —Keri Hulme

      Come with me, along the great avenue, where a new destiny will be born. Come with me, to the heart of the Earth. Friend, bring your child, brother, bring your mother, all of us along the great avenue. The time of the wind has come, exploding the silence.

      —Victor Jara

      The wind whistles within me. I am naked. Master of nothing, master of no one, not even master of my own convictions, I am my face in the wind, against the wind, and I am the wind that strikes my face.

      —Eduardo Galeano

      Love is the answer … Yes is the answer … Yes is surrender …

      —John Lennon

      I dedicate The Refugee Hotel to Nelson Rodríguez, because he never forgot.

      To Bob Everton, because he never gave up.

      Acknowledgements

      I would like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for individual writing grants. I wrote the first draft of the play during my residency at the Vancouver Playhouse. The Playwrights’ Theatre Centre in Vancouver provided a week-long workshop of the second draft and produced a workshop production of said draft. A heartfelt thanks to the 2002 Banff Playrites Colony, where I completed the third draft. The Factory Theatre’s Cross Currents Festival (Toronto), The Arts Club Theatre’s REACT Festival (Vancouver), and The Mark Taper Forum’s New Works Festival (Los Angeles) all held public readings of different drafts of the play. I am grateful to all of them.

      I would like to thank Glynis Leyshon, Elizabeth Dancoes, and Pier Carlo Talenti for dramaturgical support in the early drafts of the play. Big gratitude as well to Guillermo Verdecchia for his mentorship and support in the last fifteen years, and for his keen dramaturgical eye and feedback during rehearsals of The Refugee Hotel. I am eternally grateful to dramaturg Brian Quirt for all his work on this project.

      To the dozens of actors and directors who gave their all to each reading of every draft, eternal gratitude as well.

      Above all, I would like to thank Marilo Núñez for her unwavering belief in this play and for seeing it through to its world premiere.

      The Refugee Hotel was produced by Alameda Theatre Company in association with Theatre Passe Muraille. It premiered at Theatre Passe Muraille on September 16, 2009, with the following cast and crew:

      MANUEL: Salvatore Antonio

      MALE CUECA DANCER: Felix Basáez

      SOCIAL WORKER: Leanna Brodie

      RECEPTIONIST: Terrence Bryant

      CRISTINA: Cheri Maracle

      ISABEL: Paloma Núñez

      FLACA: Beatriz Pizano

      MANUELITA: Paula Rivera / Michelle Polak

      JUAN: Michael Scholar Jr.

      JOSELITO: Osvaldo Sepulveda

      BILL O’NEILL: Todd Thomson

      FAT JORGE: Juan Carlos Velis

      Producer: Marilo Núñez

      Director: Carmen Aguirre

      Dramaturg: Brian Quirt

      Set Designer: Trevor Schwellnus

      Lighting Designer: Itai Erdal

      Costume Designer: Andjelija Djuric

      Sound Designer: Nano Valverde

      Production Manager: Doug Morum

      Stage Manager: Andrea Schurman

      Assistant Stage Manager: Wendy Lee

      Assistant Director: Alex Castillo

      Assistant Producer: Sigrid Velis

      Head of Wardrobe: Barbara Rowe

      Synopsis

      A dark comedy about a group of Chilean refugees who arrived in Vancouver in 1974 and were put up in a modest hotel. An uncompromising look at exile, torture, guilt, and betrayal, The Refugee Hotel is ultimately about love and its power to heal.

      Cast of Characters

      MANUELITA, thirties in the present, eight in the past.

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