Two lecturers provide a satirical look at the Persian Gulf War, human relationships, international economic relations, and other aspects of contemporary life

The Noam Chomsky Lectures

Literature & Fiction

Verdecchia, Guillermo

Brooks, Daniel

Dramas & Plays

Talonbooks

drama, one-person play by Argentinian/Canadian

American Borders/Fronteras, Americanas

Coach House Pr

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.

A Line in the Sand

Youssef, Marcus

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 basean 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: Simón Bolívar and Speedy Gonzales; Columbus and Fodor’s travel guides; Ricky Ricardo and the Latin Lover; La Bamba’ and Placido Domingo; Carlos Fuentes and American made-for-TV drug-wars movies. Verdecchia twirls stereotypes and clichés, offers comparative histories, examines myths and mysticism, and provides lessons in language and dancing. Cast of one man.

Fronteras Americanas: American Borders

Humor & Entertainment

Guillermo Verdecchia is primarily known for his award-winning plays; Citizen Suárez 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 Márquez.

Citizen Suárez

Humor & Satire

’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

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 clichés 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 Beauderrièredada,” this political satire is not for the faint of heart. Cast of 4 men.

Adventures of Ali & Ali and the aXes of Evil: A Divertimento for Warlords

Chai, Camyar

Guillermo Verdecchia’s first play, Another Country (originally Final Decisions [War] ), was his response to his home country Argentina’s Dirty War in 197683, 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.

Another Country / bloom

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: Simón Bolívar 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 clichés, 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 García 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.

Fronteras Americanas 2nd Edition: [Second Edition]

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Verdecchia, Guillermo. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Verdecchia, Guillermo

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Verdecchia, Guillermo. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Noam Chomsky Lectures

American Borders/Fronteras, Americanas

A Line in the Sand

A Line in the Sand

Fronteras Americanas: American Borders

Citizen Suárez

The Noam Chomsky Lectures

Adventures of Ali & Ali and the aXes of Evil: A Divertimento for Warlords

Another Country / bloom

Fronteras Americanas 2nd Edition: [Second Edition]