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.

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.

Carmen Aguirre's profile page

• Winner, New Play Centre Award for Best New Play

“A humourous and heartbreaking look at life in exile.”
— Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles

“A powerful new play.” – CBC Radio

“Full of wonder and terror …The battle between courage and cowardice looms large here; duty to one’s self or to one’s people is a constant internal compromise … humourous … heartbreaking.” – EYE WEEKLY

“Four-star hotel … This moving, often engrossing play paints rich portraits of eight refugees: some tortured, some fearful, all defiant … a production to catch for its theatrical strengths and historic insights … triumphant.” – NOW Magazine

“[Aguirre is] an artist with an impressive life story and impeccable intentions … Aguirre lived what she is writing about … and that lends The Refugee Hotel real authenticity.” – Globe & Mail