A Conversation with Catherine Filloux
Rent from DeepDyve- A Conversation with Catherine Filloux
For twenty-five years, Catherine Filloux has been writing plays about human rights and social justice. She has also been a spokesperson for the value of theater as a force for social change. She has given readings and workshops and overseen productions in Cambodia, Sudan, South Sudan, Iraq, Morocco, Northern Ireland, Italy, Belgium, and Bosnia. Her more than twenty plays and librettos have been produced in New York, across the U.S., and in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, and her essays have appeared in such leading theater magazines as American Theatre and Drama Review.
Most recently, she was honored in New York City with the 2017 Otto René Castillo Award for Political Theatre. Her new play Kidnap Road was presented by Anna Deavere Smith as part of NYU’s Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue in 2016. For her long career of activism in the theater community, Filloux received the 2015 Planet Activist Award. Her play whatdoesfreemean?—about women and mass incarceration in the U.S.—will premiere in 2018, produced by Nora’s Playhouse. She is also the librettist for three produced operas—including Where Elephants Weep, which premiered in Cambodia—and has been commissioned by the Vienna State Opera to write the libretto for composer Olga Neuwirth’s new opera, Orlando, to premiere in 2019.
A former Fulbright senior specialist in Cambodia and Morocco, Filloux is an artist-in-residence at La MaMa Theatre, a member of the Vassar College faculty, and a cofounder of Theatre Without Borders.
The following conversation took place in July 2017.
You’ve been writing plays for a long time. What in your background led you to concentrate on issues of human rights, social justice, and equality?
French was my first language, and when I learned English I consumed it with joy. I grew up on the border between San Diego and Tijuana, and was very familiar with that border and with Mexico. My father grew up in France during the Nazi occupation when the country was split into zones. My mother’s French-Belgian-Corsican family lived in Algeria, North Africa, for three generations before her. I inherited the privilege of being a citizen of the world. And we were strangers in a strange land. [End Page 202]
When I first went to Cambodia in 2001, it was almost a decade after I had begun writing about the genocide. What Cambodian women refugees had told me for years made it seem as if Pol Pot—his real name Saloth Sar—was in the room with us, though we were in Bronx, New York. Why did he do it? I wondered. Why were they now here, these women whom I grew to love, in this strange land, where they told me Spanish would be a better language to learn than English, since the Bronx was a Dominican neighborhood. And also Dominican were the Sisters who ran St. Rita’s Refugee Center in the Bronx, where we all met.
When I landed for the first time at the airport in Phnom Penh, I could feel the wandering ghosts, kmauit, as I got on the back of a moto and entered the sea of motos that formed the most extraordinary Zen flow of traffic I’d ever seen.
You have had plays produced, held workshops, and spoken about theater and human rights all over the world. And Theatre Without Borders, which you cofounded, is devoted to supporting theater worldwide. How would you compare the ways that socially aware theater such as yours—dealing with very difficult social and legal issues—is received in some of the countries you’ve been to? What has been the reaction to these kinds of plays?
I’ve experienced productions of my plays translated into languages including Arabic, Bosnian, French, Guatemalan Spanish, Khmer (Cambodian), and Kurdish, in a variety of international venues. I’m always struck by the flexibility that is required when a playwright crosses borders. In the U.S., a playwright’s words are not to be altered; however, I’ve found that compromise and having an open mind are key attributes. One...
