Shotgun Dreaming

In a Buenos Aires bedroom, a man and a young girl sit in darkness after an anonymous liaison.  He is a teacher who makes up for his meagre salary with ‘parallel activities’; she, a teenager with an obsessively protective father and some dark obsessions of her own.  Scarred by a violent past, she resolves to test the truth of her present, in a violent move that may prove devastating.

One day, when I was five, there was a knock at the door.  

My mum was having a bath and she told me to open it.  I asked who it was and a voice said, ‘I’m a friend of your father’s.’  I told him my father wasn’t in.  The voice said to let him come in and wait.  When I opened the door, three men came in wearing crash helmets on their heads, smashed in the bathroom door and shot my mother; she landed on the edge of the bathtub with her eyes clouded with shampoo.  Before they left, they said to say hello to my dad.    

Shotgun Dreaming was originally performed at The Royal Court Theatre’s States of Violence season.  It was later performed at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, directed by Roxana Silbert.

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