| “A desire to
take a stand – no
matter what – inspired my new play, Killing the Boss. What
can a playwright truly do to work for justice? How far do you put
yourself out there? What do you do with the anger and the pain? Killing
the Boss has been a hard, long road toward forgiveness, toward
my belief in theater as an extremely precious art form.”
-Catherine Filloux
from “Here and There” – The Dramatist
CATHERINE
FILLOUX is a playwright who focuses on genocide
and other human rights issues. Her body of work showcases her dedication
to these issues. 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
a wall that's been built up against these things, and to write
theater about them is part of the challenge."1 She
has definitely met that challenge.
To date, she
has written four plays that address the Cambodian genocide: Eyes of the Heart,
Photographs from S-21, Silence of God, and Where Elephants Weep.
Her interest was piqued after reading of the psychosomatic blindness suffered
by a group of Cambodian women who witnessed the massacres of the Khmer Rouge. The
stories of these women formed the basis of her play Eyes of the Heart.
She continued to work 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 Center for Immigration and Refugee Services in the Bronx,
New York. Photographs from S-21 has been produced in many different
countries, including Cambodia. In her article, “Here and There,” Filloux
writes, “Through my playwriting work regarding genocide and human rights,
I share with [Mu] Sochua the faith that change is possible and we can make it
happen.” 2
Her plays exploring human rights do
not end with Cambodia. Her
newest play, Dog and Wolf, grapples with both the Bosnian genocide
and political asylum in the U.S. Her play The Beauty Inside is
about an attempted honor killing and was workshopped in Arabic, in Morocco,
before being produced in New York. Lemkin’s House follows
Raphael Lemkin, the man who invented the word genocide, into the afterlife
and asks how his soul can rest in peace when the Rwandan and Bosnian genocides
are occurring.
She
penned the libretto for the opera, Where Elephants Weep, a commission
by Cambodian Living Arts. An international collaborative piece, the opera
previewed in Lowell, Massachusetts in 2007 and opened in Phnom Penh in November
2008. The opera is sung in Khmer and English with subtitles in both languages. A
fusion of traditional Cambodia and the modern West, this work combines musical
styles to create a Cambodian American Rock Opera. She is also the librettist
for The Floating Box (Composer Jason Kao Hwang), released by New World
Records and a Critic’s Choice in Opera News.
In
addition to her work as a solo playwright, Filloux has done a good deal of
collaborative work. She has collaborated on The Breach and Seven. Filloux
and fellow playwrights Tarell McCraney and Joe Sutton tackled the subject of
Hurricane Katrina in The Breach, rooting their stories in the personal
narratives of survivors. She was also one of the seven contributing playwrights
for the play, Seven. This piece is a testimony to seven amazing
women from seven very different countries and backgrounds, working to better
the lives of those around them. She is also a co-founder of Theatre Without
Borders, a volunteer-based organization that engages in international theater
exchange and collaboration.
It
should not be surprising that Filloux’s work does not end here. She
has served extensively as a speaker for human rights and playwriting conferences
and organizations around the world, including Amnesty International; RCN Justice & Démocratie,
Brussels; Shared Spaces Youth Culture Arts Network, Sligo, Ireland; California
Institute of the Arts; Brandeis University; TCG; The Bushwick School for Social
Justice; and Boston’s StageSource.
In
addition to writing plays, Filloux has written articles, appearing in American
Theatre, Manoa, The Drama Review, Contemporary Theatre
Review (UK), and the Drama Guild Quarterly. She has worked
as a French Translator for various plays and pieces of literature. She
has been honored with many awards, fellowships, and grants, including New Generations-Future
Collaborations Award (Mellon Foundation/TCG), PeaceWriting Award (Omni Center
for Peace), Roger L. Stevens Award (Kennedy Center), Eric Kocher Playwrights
Award (O'Neill), Callaway Award (New Dramatists), Fulbright Senior Specialist
(Cambodia and Morocco), William Inge Center for the Arts Playwright-In-Residence,
Thurber Playwright-In-Residence, Asian Cultural Council Grant, Winner Nausicaa
Franco-American Play Contest, Rockefeller MAP Fund (for The
Breach and The Floating Box), 5-time Heideman Award Finalist
(Actors Theatre of Louisville), Juror for 2004 MES International Theater Festival,
Sarajevo, Core Writer of The Playwrights’ Center, and New Dramatists
alumna.
A
Collection of five of her new plays, “Silence of God and Other Plays” is
published by Seagull Books, with introductions for each play by leading scholars,
who provide context and commentary on the range of Filloux’s
drama.
2 Filloux,
Catherine. “Here and There.”The Dramatist: The Journal
of The Dramatists Guild of America, Inc. March/April 2007, Vol. 9,
No. 4.
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