Check out Catherine's latest interview in Ms.
The Ms. Q&A: Award-Winning Playwright Catherine Filloux Takes on Femicide, Trauma, War, Immigration and More
Told entirely through letters, emails, and dictated messages, Third Person is an epistolary play that centers on Octavio, a passionate high school student, his mother Diane, an English teacher and poet, and Robert, a wealthy CEO of a defense conglomerate and parent at
Octavio’s school. What begins as a personal inquiry becomes a profound reckoning with silence and accountability.
The role of Octavio was written for Salinas, now stepping into the spotlight in a production that bridges generations and communities. Directed by Elena Araoz, the show builds on her past collaborations with Filloux (How to Eat an Orange, Kidnap Road) and features casting by Pat McCorkle, with an innovative multi-cast approach that invites rotating interpretations of the three roles.
Filloux has designed Third Person to be sustainably produced in a range of settings—from major institutions to underserved spaces—with a minimalist staging model: three microphones, a table, and lights. This radical simplicity shifts the focus back to the words, the actors, and the urgent themes of the play: student activism, corporate power, the policing of women educators, and the fight to be heard. There is a missile-like precision, where humour, poetry, passion, intelligence are used to exact effect.
CultureHub, September 20, 2025, 2pm, 6pm, and 8pm,
47 Great Jones Street, Third Floor, New York City
“As an artist, I will rise up and make change”
For the past three decades, award-winning artist, playwright, and librettist Catherine Filloux has been traveling to conflict areas around the world creating art that addresses human rights and social justice.
Filloux has traveled to Iraq where her play about honor killing, The Beauty Inside, was produced in the Kurdish language, starring actors from around Iraq. In Cambodia, her play Photographs from S-21 and her opera Where Elephants Weep were performed by both Cambodian and U.S. actors. In the U.S., her plays and operas have addressed mass incarceration, voting rights, immigration, and political asylum. Recent writing projects include one with Lamp Lifeboat Ladder with refugee-survivors in Greece, formerly incarcerated writers with Rehabilitation Through the Arts, and supporting her Cambodian friend, now a political prisoner.
The New York Times calls Filloux’s work “compelling drama…a call to action…about the place where horror and grief meet.”
Immigrant Report writes her plays are “more than just stories, they’re catalysts; they aim to send you forth from the theater not just satisfied and thinking but to make change in the world.”
Exeunt says “the human rights playwright…Filloux’s play opens another window to a large-scale issue that deserves more attention.”
Broadway World called her “adeptly employing thematic devices to explore the human desire and need to help others, ultimately furthering humanity and leaving the audience with a craving to give back to any person or community in need.”
The child of a French father and an Algerian mother, raised in San Diego, Filloux grew up with an outsider’s perspective — it has informed all of her work. She has the spirit of a fighter.
“It is unacceptable that women still don’t have rights; it’s unacceptable that the poor stay poor.
Now is the time for art, for change, for beauty, and for human rights; I won’t take no for an answer.”
“Catherine FIlloux is a leading light in the richest sense. There's darkness out there in the world, and she carries discernment and courage forward in text and action, inspiring reflection that urges action, and hope that orients progressive change. There's darkness in here - in the heart's disordered appetites - and she has the moxy and the patience to discover light's prime in the midst of a soul's confusion. Genocide, injustice - unkindness - are subjects; love, graceful poetics, and a deeply collaborative practice are her healing address. This is a highfallutin' look at her mercies. But her humor, her romantic dancing, and her esthetic and corporeal hospitality are as ready and as bold. A leading light, and we follow, because it's time.” - ERIK EHN