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by Carmen Aguirre, directed by Brian Quirt

Nightswimming with Neworld Theatre, Irving Greenberg Theatre Centre, Ottawa

January 17-February 3, 2013

“Ese hombre que tú ves ahí ... sólo sabe hacer sufrir....”

Carmen Aguirre’s Blue Box has nothing to do with recycling.  The box the title refers to is, as Aguirre tells us right at the start, her vagina.  It’s blue because it hasn’t had enough use.  That’s her view in this sexually and politically frank autobiographical narrative that intertwines Aguirre’s past as a rebel against the regime of Augustin Pinochet in Chile in the 1980s and Aguirre’s search years later for the perfect man.  It was a hit at the GCTC’s 2012 undercurrents festival and now returns in a full production.  While the story of Aguirre’s love life is obviously meant to leaven the political story, there’s no doubt that the political story is the far more riveting of the two.

In any conventional sense Carmen Aguirre’s Blue Box is not really a play at all.  It really is an act of storytelling and one in which Aguirre occasional plays other parts for a line or two but is essentially herself telling her own story.  Director Brian Quirt has done next to nothing to lend any sort of theatricality to this storytelling.  For the majority of the show’s 90 minutes, Aguirre stands within about a foot of the front row of the audience leaving the only prop, a stool, to sit in the large void of the empty stage behind her.  At one point, when the action takes place in Vancouver, a narrow cloth suddenly drops down behind the stool to set the scene, but since the action has switched between Chile, Argentina and Los Angeles without any backdrops, the use of the cloth seems perfunctory.  Itai Erdal, one of Canada’s best lighting designers, has little opportunity to show off his skill.  He creates pools of light for Aguirre to step into, uses a mirror ball for a disco scene and ends with a tight fadeout on Aguirre’s face, but if Quirt had chosen there is much more he could have asked Erdal to do make Aguirre’s tale theatrical rather than the live-radio narrative it seems.

Based on her memoir, Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter (2011), Aguirre interleaves the story of when she and her first husband fought in the underground against Pinochet’s regime with the story of divorcing her second husband and finding what she thinks is the ideal man.  The two stories have nothing in common except that the political story is not about sex and the love story is.  In fact, although Aguirre was married when she was a revolutionary, she abstained from sex both because she thought she would lose her edge and because the atmosphere of constant fear obliterated the desire for sex.  In imagery the principal link is that a person’s pupils dilate both during orgasm and during fear.  In plot both quests fail.  Aguirre’s group fails to foment a socialist revolution in Chile in 1988 and the ideal man (Vision Man) that the ghost of Aguirre’s grandmother showed her in a vision turns out to be a self-centred narcissist. 

A third story that ought to come into play earlier in the show is Aguirre’s account of working for a phone-sex company in Vancouver.  One of her clients leaves a lasting impression.  Billy from Kentucky has called not for sex but to pour out his personal problems and tell her how lonely he is.  He is naive enough to think that Carmen will actually come to visit him in Kentucky.  She finds herself in the awkward position of becoming an ideal for a young person she doesn’t even know.

The unifying theme for the show could have been the loss of ideals, but Aguirre has not lost her political ideals as is evident in her critique of the exploitive conditions of the phone-sex company.  Though Aguirre cuts back and forth among the three stories without transition, the question she never addresses is how the socialist revolutionary side of her fits with the sexual side of her that falls for a Hollywood actor, i.e. someone who not only is deeply entrenched with the ideals of the “imperialist north” as she calls it in her memoir but works in one of the most capitalist sectors of it.  Hollywood spends millions on creating something out of nothing and then drumming up demand for it.  The false dreams of the phone-sex line and the false dreams of Hollywood are only different in scale, but Aguirre never makes this connection nor explains how she could ignore Vision Man’s politics.  She could say she was blinded by good looks and good sex, but she doesn’t.

There is a bit too much of typical the Cosmopolitan story about the Vision Man tale to make it as compelling as Aguirre’s narrative of working for the underground.  The ideal sex story is overly familiar whereas how many of us have ever known what it is like to work to overthrow a repressive political regime?  How many of us know what it’s like to work for a phone-sex company?  These last two are fascinating and Aguirre’s description of the “Japanese style” of being followed by the mysterious Blue-Eyed Man is chilling.  By the end of the show I wished Aguirre had told us much more about the resistance movement in Chile and how it planned to achieve its goals than about Vision Man, who seems a dead end to us long before he does to Aguirre. 

Aguirre tells her stories in a completely natural way.  An actor would heighten the transitions from one story to the next, but Aguirre slides from one to the other without a beat or change of tone.  She uses her natural, uninflected voice.  It has an inherently ironic tinge to it but a more modulated tone would help to make the 90 minutes a more enjoyable listen.  Strangely, the three times when Aguirre does act, that is when she translates the lyrics of popular Spanish-language songs like Rocío Jurado’s “Ese Hombre” pertinent to the action, we see how impassioned she can be.  It’s odd, then, that for her narrative she should use such an unvaried deadpan delivery.

It’s not hard to see why Aguirre’s show should be so popular.  Her unashamed, uninhibited discussion of sex is totally un-Canadian in its forthrightness.  And her stories of resistance fighting and phone-sex are also intriguing because of their unfamiliarity.  All three are united in the person of Aguirre, but I would like her to give us greater insight into how these diverse aspects all go together and especially on how she views the failure of the political and sexual quests she describes.  She glows with intelligence and her show is clearly just as much about her red-hot mind and it is about her “blue box”.  I’d like Aguirre to move from mere narration of action to more reflection upon it. 

              

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Carmen Aguirre. ©2012 Andrew Alexander.

For tickets, visit www.gctc.ca.