Guillermo Verdecchia

'Ordinarily, theatre relies on illusion in order to reveal truths; The Noam Chomsky Lectures relies on truths in order to reveal illusions. Following the impetus of Chomsky himself, Brooks and Verdecchia have recognized that mass media, mass spectacle, have trivialized and severed consciousness and conscience, separating both from a communal base. We collectively know little about what is done in our name by our elected governments and the business interests they serve. The Noam Chomsky Lectures assumes not only that we do want to know, that our 'knowing together' may change things, but also that it is less painful to know than to not know.' - Joyce Nelson in her introduction to The Noam Chomsky Lectures

Guillermo Verdecchia's new play Feast follows a comfortable North American family as they contend with breakfast, family life, and the end of things as we know them. The family deals with the coming troubles in their own ways. Twenty-something daughter Isabel is increasingly convinced that something drastic must be done. Her mother, Julia, fortifies their home in preparation. And her father, Mark, lets his foodie cravings precipitate the family's unraveling as he brings Chukwuemeka Okonkwe - super-competent, under-employed fixer and logistical genius looking for the business opportunity he deserves - into their lives. Moving from North America to Beirut to Mombasa, with stops along the way at Starbucks, The Centre for Avant-Garde Geography, and a cave on the island of Lampedusa, Feast spans the globalized world and beyond, offering a wild, magical-realist take on the uncertainties and anxieties of the early twenty-first century.

A play about sensitivity training that is anything but sensitive.

In this sequel to the hilarious and hard-hitting The Adventures of Ali & Ali and the aXes of Evil, the agitprop collaborative team of Camyar Chai, Guillermo Verdecchia, and Marcus Youssef turns its idiosyncratic brand of political satire to new global realities. Following the election of U.S. president Barack Obama in 2008, collective optimism for a more tolerant, peaceful, and co-operative post- Bush world spreads to Canada -- and to the backroom of Salim's Falafel Shoppe in Toronto. There, Ali Hakim and Ali Ababwa, refugee entertainers from the fictitious, war-torn country of Agraba, are inspired to write a stage play in celebration of the new president's message of "hope and change." The premiere of their Yo Mama, Osbama! (or, How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Half-Black President) halts abruptly when an RCMP constable arrives at the theatre and arrests the pair for its financial ties to the Agrabanian People's Front, an alleged "terrorist organization" on the Canadian government's watch list. Continuity becomes more apparent than change when Ali and Ali are swiftly put on trial.As the hapless playwrights try to defend themselves in the farcical deportation hearing that unfolds, racial and cultural stereotypes are invoked -- and lampooned -- as quickly as dubious evidence is presented. But, in the midst of the biting comedy, more serious questions are raised about the cost for some when we endeavour to protect the "freedoms" of others. Cast of 1 woman and 3 men.

Fuelled by equal parts outrage, intelligence, and wit, Fronteras Americanas recreates one person's struggle to construct a home between two cultures, while exploding the images and constructs built up around Latinos and Latin America. This one-person play works through bold juxtapositions and satiric reference points: Simon Bolivar and Speedy Gonzales; Columbus and Fodor's travel guides; Ricky Ricardo and the Latin Lover; La Bamba and Placido Domingo; Carlos Fuentes and American drug-war movies. Verdecchia twirls stereotypes and cliches, offers comparative histories, examines myths and mysticism, and provides lessons in language and dancing. However, even as the ungovernable and surrealistic Fecundo Morales Secundo, or "Wideload," edifies us about how sex between a "Latin" and a "Saxon" can be "a mind-expanding and culturally enriching experience," eloquently quoting Octavio Paz and Federico Garcia Lorca in direct response to contemporary struggles and injustices, he also transcends his role of "estereotype," reaching a place beyond maps that are only metaphors where borders are more than divisions between countries and take on the most outlandish properties.In Verdecchia's preface to the new edition, when examining his reasons for bringing forth a "refried" form of Fronteras Americanas in the 21st century, he indicates: There are, after all, people all over the globe living, crossing, resisting, defining, and defending linguistic, cultural, racial, gender, psycho- geographical, cartographic, political and other borders. While the world has changed in many ways since I first wrote and performed it, the processes of migration, displacement, and globalization that informed the play's creation have only accelerated. Some of us may lead more networked lives now, but the Border is alive and well and living all over the globe. Cast of 1 man.

Guillermo Verdecchia's first play, Another Country (originally Final Decisions [War] ), was his response to his home country Argentina's Dirty War in 1976--83, when leaders of the military junta held that their campaign against "leftist subversives and terrorists" was the beginning of the Third World War. The scale of their undertaking was defined by their statement: "First we will kill all the subversives; then, their collaborators; later, those who sympathize with them; afterward, those who remain indifferent; and finally, those who are undecided." The public relations firm Burson-Marsteller was hired to make Argentina look good while the junta (trained in counter-insurgency at the U.S.-based and funded School of the Americas, or The School of the Coups as it's known in Latin America) and its collaborators reorganized the nation. His latest play, bloom (the title is taken from a line in Paul Celan's poem, "Psalm": "we bloom in thy spite"), overflows with images from T.S.Eliot's The Waste Land("hooded hordes swarming over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth," among others), and seems utterly contemporaneous with his first, in the context of the current destruction of Afghanistan and Iraq, part of the larger effort of an international reorganization of the world we know as "The War on Terror." Published together here for the first time, these plays constitute an unsparing interrogation of a world perpetually at war.

In this elaborate agitprop theatrical collaboration, the internal contradictions and duplicitous double-speak of the "war on terror" are exposed as the propaganda vehicles for the neo-colonialism of the West that they are. "Ali Hakim" and "Ali Ababwa," refugees from the imaginary country "Agraba," attempt to seduce their audience into providing them with food, refuge, security, freedom and the material benefits of Western consumer society, failing miserably at every step. A hard-hitting presentation of a play-within-a-play assaults the audience as Youssef, Verdecchia and Chai do Shakespeare, Shaw and Swift one better with an endless string of buffooneries and absurdities derived from an inversion of the cliches defining the geo-politics of the Middle East at the beginning of the 21st century. Informed by the research of Paul Krugman and Noam Chomsky, sent up by the post-modern cultural relativism of "Jean Paul Jacques Beauderrieredada," this political satire is not for the faint of heart. Cast of 4 men.

Guillermo Verdecchia is primarily known for his award-winning plays; Citizen Suarez is his first book of short stories, and it is a remarkable debut. These stories take on the quintessential issues forced upon a generation betrayed by their citizenship--a betrayal the more profound because it subsists primarily in the global death of the nation-state. These are stories about people traveling, wandering or lost between countries and languages--people caught between the impulse to flee and the desire to belong. Sex, geography and politics grip the protagonists of these pieces, demanding promises, compromises and resolutions. These are stories about power--personal, civic, sexual, filial, political--and how, lubricious, it slips between the fingers. Quiet, careful, witty, they document and celebrate survival--consolations, complicities and accommodations in the face of indifference, cruelty and fear. The characters of these stories are known to the reader, intimately known, because they are revealed to us in the way that only we know ourselves--in those darkest recesses of the desires and fears we imagine, we hide from others, and thus, also from those we love.Most astonishing of all for a writer venturing into a new genre for the first time is the elegant surety of his style--Verdecchia speaks in these stories with the fatalistic lyricism of Lorca, the philosophical ambiguity of Paz, and the emotional scalpel of Marquez.

In the autumn of 1990, during Operation Desert Storm, two young men, one a troubled Canadian soldier, the other a teenage Palestinian black-marketeer, meet in the scorched Qatari desert. Breaching the divide of a profound cultural misunderstanding and against a backdrop of massive global conflict, these two become unlikely and secret friends. This tenuous friendship is severed by the torture and murder of the 16-year-old Palestinian inside the Canadian base--an act to which the Canadian soldier was at least a witness and perhaps a willing participant. Weaving poetic drama with myriad documentary sources, A Line in the Sand rips the benevolent mask off recent western peacekeeping operations and challenges Canada's long treasured national mythology that it is a nation of quiet diplomats. It asks us to imagine how horrors like these could be perpetrated with our money, in our name and by people much like us. Cast of three to five men.

Fuelled by equal parts outrage, intelligence and wit, Fronteras Americanas re-creates one person's struggle to construct a home between two cultures, while exploding the images and constructs built up around Latinos and Latin America. This one-person play works through bold juxtapositions and satiric reference points: Simon Bolivar and Speedy Gonzales; Columbus and Fodor's travel guides; Ricky Ricardo and the Latin Lover; Â La Bamba' and Placido Domingo; Carlos Fuentes and American made-for-TV drug-wars movies. Verdecchia twirls stereotypes and cliches, offers comparative histories, examines myths and mysticism, and provides lessons in language and dancing.Cast of one man.