The Refugee Hotel had its world premiere last night at Theatre Passe-Muraille for a small, enthusiastic audience. It was difficult to be unmoved by the stories of persecution and the residual trauma felt by the play’s main characters – refugees from the Pinochet regime that fled to Vancouver in 1974. These are incredibly powerful stories that could hold their own without a stage. But what was most interesting about the staging of these stories was its treatment of the Canadian cultural landscape as a welcoming, yet precarious destination for newcomers and the arresting comic relief that is necessary for us to overcome the effects of torture, displacement, and personal sacrifice.
The play opens with an awkward interaction between a non-Spanish speaking Canadian social worker and a family of Chilean Refugees. The mother, Flaca (Beatriz Pizano) is a political prisoner that was somehow saved from execution by the Canadian embassy. The father, Jorge (Juan Carlos Velis) was a banker in Santiago and was reunited with his wife on the plane to Canada after being separated for over a year while she was involved in the armed struggle against Pinochet. Their two children, Manuelita and Joselito (Paula Rivera and Osvaldo Sepulveda) lived with their grandmother after being abandoned by their mother before being re-united with their family on their way to Vancouver. The overly-eager Canadian social worker (Leanna Brodie) introduces the family to their new home – a tacky hotel in downtown Vancouver run by a sassy gay man (Terence Bryant) – and tries her best to communicate to the refugees with mixture of hand gestures and French. Aguirre cleverly illustrates the linguistic divide by having the refugees speak in perfect English, but still being incomprehensible to the Canadians. Not only does this allow the audience to pick up on cultural colloquialisms through literal translation, it highlights the humiliating tendency many Canadians have – assuming that those who don’t speak our language are unintelligent or have little to say.
As the play moves forward, we are introduced to other Chilean refugees – a railway worker, a factory man, a Mapuche – and watch as they struggle to overcome their violent past and desperately try to justify their decision to leave their home country. Aguirre is able to balance the severity of the characters’ experiences with light humour, inciting the audience to laugh at the darkest of subjects - a necessary move for a play that deals with very disturbing forms of torture and mutilation, let alone the emotional trauma of displacement. At times the intensity of the relationships between the characters falls flat as the audience is more drawn to the individuals stories of persecution, which are a far more compelling in both structure and detail. The dialogue needs to be tightened if we are to feel the same sense of exasperation about how the characters feel about one another as they do about their own sense of survival. Aguirre does, however, provide a brilliant display of children refugees and the way in which they adapt to a new society. While the adults are concerned with their allegiance to Chile and the lives they left behind, Manuelita and Joselito are more attuned to their new environment and are eager to strike the balance that many children of immigrants must do between their ‘home’ and ‘host’ cultures. This duality is expressed through Manuelita’s curiosity about her parent’s lives in Chile, and Joselito’s desire to forget his past. A touching moment occurs when the social worker gives a gift to the children and the warmth and kindness behind the act transcends the boundaries of language – the children do not need a translation to understand the social worker’s compassion.
Although the Canadian characters play a peripheral role in this production, they are all linked to the refugees through their own experiences of persecution. The social worker, receptionist, and the representative of the interfaith church all link their compassion for the refugees to their own understanding of ‘fleeing’ from something. But at times their compassion is expressed in the wrong way, or not at all. Here, it is clear that Aguirre is showing us how Canadians often feel unified by being either immigrants or recent descendents of immigrants, however, a Ukrainian farming family and a Guatemalan refugee are not likely to have undergone the same process of exile and adaptation. We must therefore be cognizant of the diversity of newcomer experiences and not assume that those processes of exile and adaptation can be a point of commonality.
I remember when Aguirre delivered a guest lecture in my Post-Colonial Theatre class at a university in Western Canada. To the horror of many young British Columbians in the lecture hall, Aguirre said that the Vancouver theatre scene was definitively racist: people of colour are ghettoized into particular roles (The maid, the whore) and when people of colour are in main roles it is for effect and considered a ‘risqué’ choice. The Refugee Hotel brings together a diverse group of actors to tell the story of the initial experience of arrival in Canada. How does having everything provided for – work, shelter, and food – affect the psychological issues that accompany the refugee experience? Does being thrust into a secure environment make someone feel safer or make their suffering stronger from isolation? Perhaps now that we have a professional Latin American theatre company in this country exploring these topics, hopefully we will gain insight into the contemporary issues of this country’s theatre community through an equally compelling production in the near future.
The Refugee Hotel plays at Theatre Passe-Muraille in Toronto until October 4. Tuesday-Saturday 7:30pm, Sunday 2:30pm. $15-$32. 416-504-7529.
Theatre Passe-Muraille - http://www.passemuraille.on.ca/
Alameda Theatre Company - http://www.alamedatheatre.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment