Catherine Filloux is an American playwright. Filloux's plays have confronted the issue of human rights in many nations. She is of French and Algeria descent. She lives in New York City, New York.[1]
Biography
Filloux's mother is from Oran, Algeria and her father from Guéret, France. Of her parents, Filloux says, "My dad was born in the center of France, and he became an adventurer," who sailed from France to New York in a catamaran.[2] "My mom was a very literate person who loved literature" and wrote poetry in both French and English. As a child, Filloux moved with her family to San Diego, where she grew up.[2] She says, "We grew up... in this kind of schism of Algeria, France, and San Diego. So it made for a background of not really knowing where one belongs..."[2]
Filloux's plays have confronted the issue of human rights in many nations. She was first drawn to the subject upon reading of the psychosomatic blindness suffered by a group of Cambodian women after witnessing the massacres of the Khmer Rouge, a story that formed the basis of her 2004 play Eyes of the Heart. She worked with survivors of the Cambodian genocide, developing the oral history project A Circle of Grace with the Cambodian Women's Group at St. Rita's Centre for Immigration and Refugee Services in the Bronx, New York.
Her 2005 play Lemkin's House is based on the life of Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jew and American immigrant lawyer who invented the word genocide in 1944 and spent his life striving to have it recognized as an international crime.
In her 2010 play, Dog and Wolf, a U.S. asylum lawyer seeks to win asylum for Jasmina, a Bosnian refugee. Filloux says of her play, "[It] is written in the staggered poetry of the effort to connect and articulate," grappling with themes of identity, law, sexuality, and family.[3]
Filloux states "For a while, these crimes were the 'best-kept secrets,' but they're not even secrets. They happen all the time, and nobody cares. And that's the problem on some level with doing this kind of theater. There's just a little wall that's been built up against these things, and to write theater about them is part of the challenge."[4]
Throughout her career, Filloux has constantly sought new ways to tell stories and engage audiences such as with opera. In 2022, Filloux participated in a talk with Keturah Stickann as part of Words First: Talking Text in Opera. During the conversation, titled “Catherine Filloux and Writing Social Justice,” Filloux discussed the artistic process, particularly in the realm of opera and her work on the libretto of Orlando with Olga Neuwirth, describing the "sublime" aspect of seeing the music of an opera carry the words of a text.[5][6]
In a 2008 interview in The Brooklyn Rail, Filloux stated: "For twenty years I have written about Cambodia, P.T.S.D., genocide and trauma. People have exposed their pain to me. I have tried to understand how such violence can occur, how people can so bravely survive, and I felt the raw need to be honest about myself. ... To hold two opposing things in your hands at the same time and to balance them: I'm in that passage, trying to be Here and There. Last time I went to Cambodia, I felt for the first time I could be in two places at the same time, and not compare. That came from writing this play Killing the Boss."[7]
Catherine’s musical “Welcome to the Big Dipper” premieres Off-Broadway in 2024 at the York Theatre in New York City; it is a National Alliance for Musical Theatre finalist and received a workshop at the Redhouse Arts Center in Syracuse, NY (Hunter Foster, AD).[8][9]
Catherine Filloux was a recipient of the 2024 LMCC Manhattan Arts Grants in New York, recognizing her contributions to the arts.[10]
Her play WHITE SAVIOR was nominated for the inaugural 2023-25 Venturous List, an honor chosen by nationally prominent playwrights for the Venturous Theater Fund. The play was also part of the 2023 Theater555 Reading Series, produced by the Masterworks Theater Company, with Ylfa Edelstein and Dan Lauria serving as Artistic Directors.[11][12]
Filloux's play THIRTY-FIVE, featuring illustrations by Luba Lukova, was published in the December/January 2023/24 issue of The Brooklyn Rail. She contributed to the "On Art and Activism" discussion alongside other noted playwrights such as Johnson, Bayeza, and Deen in The Dramatist's May/June 2023 issue.[13]
In 2023, Next Stage Press published three of her plays: BEAUTY INSIDE, DOG AND WOLF, and KIDNAP ROAD. Her nonfiction essay The Wild Child appeared in Writing Disorder in Spring 2022.[14] Additionally, she authored the chapter “Calls to Action: Collaboration across Difference” in the 2024 Routledge publication Theatre Responds to Social Trauma: Chasing the Demons. Beyond the stage, Filloux has developed five films for the Reimagining Myself transition prison reentry program with Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA).[15]
She also serves as the board president of CultureHub.org, an organization dedicated to art and technology collaboration.[16]
Works
Plays (selected productions)
How to Eat an Orange
"How to Eat an Orange" is a world premiere play by Filloux produced at La MaMa Theatre, New York City, Spring 2024 about Argentinian visual artist/activist Claudia Bernardi surviving under Argentina's military junta; her artwork excavating genocide; and fighting for international justice. With community outreach programming. (Commissioned by INTAR, for a virtual workshop.)[17]
Under the Skin
2021 Based on the writing of Claudia Bernardi; Created for and developed with Mercedes Herrero; Commissioned by INTAR; Virtual Workshop, Lou Moreno, Artistic Director, and Paul Slee Rodriguez, Executive Director, New York, NY
White Savior
2020 Pygmalion Productions, Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center, Salt Lake City, UT
2019 A Live Stream Web Story, Culture Hub and Chaotic Sequence Productions; Directed by Daria Sommers; Produced by Daria Sommers and Arthur Vincie; Theatre Director DeMone Seraphin; Livestreaming and video production by CultureHub, New York, NY
2014 Book Wings Iraq, a collaborative bilingual theatre initiative produced in partnership with The University of Iowa's International Writing Program and the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Department of State. Iowa City, Iowa, and Baghdad, Iraq.
2004 Season, National Asian American Theatre Company (NAATCO), New York, New York
2002 25th Bay Area Playwrights Festival, San Francisco, California
Escuela del Mundo
2006/2005 Seasons, The Ohio State University Theatre Department, Columbus, Ohio, with the Office of International Affairs; Toured high schools in Ohio (Premiere/Commission)
Produced in the U.S. and around the world, including Cambodia (in Khmer), Singapore, Thailand, India, Denmark, England and France.
BPV, Passion.com, Marriage À Trois, The G Word, Lessons Of My Father, Storks, The Sun Always Rose, The Russian Doll, White Trash, Visiting Hours
These short plays were produced at Play2C Studio Berlin, Germany; HB Playwrights Theatre, New York, New York; Immigrants' Theatre Project/Women Without Borders, New York, New York; New Georges, "Watch This Space: A New Georges Anthology", HERE, New York, New York; Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab & Culture Project's "Brothers Karamazov", New York, New York; Women's Project, New York, New York; Yale Cabaret, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut; University of California, San Diego Theatre Festival, San Diego, California
2021 Grawemeyer Award; ORLANDO at the Wiener Staatsoper, Vienna State Opera, based on the novel by Virginia Woolf, Catherine Filloux is the librettist with Olga Neuwirth. The premiere was December 2019.[19][20]
2001 Season, Asia Society, New York, New York, Composer Jason Kao Hwang (Premiere/Commission); New World Records CD Release (Aaron Copland Fund) (Librettist)
Currently in development
Opera Libretti
2021-20 Thresh's L'Orient, a multidisciplinary production co-created with choreographer Preeti Vasudevan and composer Kamala Sankaram, 2021 Guggenheim Works & Process, Lincoln Center, New York, NY, (Librettist)
2021-20 Mary Shelley, a new chamber opera, music by Gerald Cohen, dramaturg, Cori Ellison, Black Tea Music (Librettist)
Musical (Co-Bookwriter)
Welcome to the Big Dipper with Composer Jimmy Roberts (I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change) and Bookwriter/ Additional Lyrics John Daggett (Lemkin's House), based on Filloux's play
2019 Workshop, Redhouse Arts Center, Syracuse, NY, (Artistic Director, Hunter Foster); 2018 NAMT Finalist, New York, NY
Screenplays
2000 Play Eyes of the Heart: Developed for Lifetime Television
1999 Priscilla's Story: Screenplay treatment, Malvina Douglas Productions, New York, New York
1990 Alter Ego: Based on the novel, Vestments, by Alfred Alcorn
1988 Prodigal Son: Optioned by Justine Bateman, Bateman Co., Los Angeles, California
The Catherine Filloux Collection includes play scripts, programs and other accompanying ephemera is held by the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute, The Ohio State University Libraries.
