CTXLT Profile/Interview: Elizabeth V. Newman, Artistic Director, Filigree Theatre, Austin
Elizabeth V. Newman: Suddenly This Fall
New theatre companies typically gain recognition slowly, quietly creating good work and accruing favorable notices at a pedestrian pace, unlike others that rush to the downstage footlights, waving for attention. Filigree Theatre's quiet approach started in 2018 and has endured the viral storms of the Covid19 pandemic of 2020-2022. Led by the theatre-wise Elizabeth V. Newman, in 2023 Filigree Theatre offeredthree spectacular plays (Antigone, Photograph 51, and Above the Fold, all receiving award nominations) in an equally spectacular venue, Factory on Fifth in downtown east Austin. Filigree’s new season offers even more intriguing theatre.
No doubt about it: producing artistic director of Filigree Theatre Elizabeth V. Newman is leading her best life as she embarks on launching the sixth season from her harbor in Austin. A native New Yorker, Elizabeth took theater classes all over NYC at H.B. Studios and Lee Strasberg and elsewhere, from age 8 and probably earlier. Shegraduated from Yale with dual B.A. degrees in History of Art and Theater Studies and followed that achievement with an M.F.A. in Film Production from Boston University. She advanced into her professional career with production and directing experiences in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, and Austin. Her website bio records that she has served as stage director on fourteen productions, producer on six stage plays, and film director on one feature and several short films. She has written feature and short film screenplays. If that’s not proof that she stays busy, here’s this: she was founding Co-President of Women in Film and Television: Austin and has served as a multi-year panelist for The Austin Film Festival.
Filigree has a formal structure for its theatrical seasons. Three productions roll forth per year, comprised of fall, winter, and spring shows. The yearly play sets have a unifying theme; Season Six is entitled “Masks and Mirrors.” Play collectors observe the productions while teasing out how each applies to that year’s theme. Season Six opens on open October 4 with Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer, a treasure of Williams’ body of work. The winter offering is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher, and the spring 2025 production hides behind the three most horrible words in theatre-language, “To Be Announced.” Stay tuned here for any early reveal of that work.
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I'm a major fan of Tennessee Williams, so I was intrigued by her choice of Suddenly Last Summer. I asked her why that particular title.
My high school senior class project was directing The Glass Menagerie. I love the poetry and the imagery, and the characters are so richly drawn. Working on this production we have such a wonderful cast—and it’s been such beautiful tablework and every time we talk about it we gain more understanding, peeling back another layer of the onion of these complex, imperfect, but beautifully rich humans…in the world of…the poetry, the language, the musicality of his words both in the dialogue and even in the stage directions. That’s why Tennessee Williams, right there.
Our fall show is part of the theater canon, and Williams very much is a part. Sometimes what we try to do is reach a little farther into the canon. For example, when we did Ibsen we did The Lady from the Sea, which is done a little bit less often, etc. Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer is done a little less often than Glass Menagerie or A Streetcar Named Desire. Someday I’d like to produce Streetcar, but….
What’s the big one…?
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
You seem to get all the best actors in Austin, and I want to know how you do it.
Happily, not only are they deeply talented actors, but they are also wonderful kind human beings. At Filigree I will invite people to come and audition. I don’t offer roles, I invite people to come and audition. If I think someone might be a good fit for a particular role, I’ll ask them to please come audition for a role. And that’s, I think, A: to be open to being surprised in the audition room, and B: to really give the actors an opportunity to--not 'oh, this is a bird in the hand, a role in the hand’-- but is this a particular role that they themselves connect with—to let them do some of the work themselves. And then in the audition room, I don’t come in with preconceived notions, just some ideas, but I watch them and remember and think of them a year or two later. If I detect or see that particular energy, I’ll cast them. Now or in some later show.
Our interview ended shortly afterward.
Suddenly Last Summer opens October 4, 2024 and runs until October 20th at Factory on Fifth, 3409 E. Fifth St. in east Austin. The play and Filigree Theatre are highly recommended to all.