The Filigree Theatre Opens 2022-23 Season With THE LADY FROM THE SEA, October 7

Austin-based independent theatre company The Filigree Theatre announces the launch of their Season Four productions and theme "By the Sea." The 2022-23 season will kick off this fall with Henrik Ibsen's "The Lady From the Sea" - haunted by the sea and a mysterious past love, a woman must choose between her married life and the thrill of the unknown lying in wait beyond the ocean deep.

Opening Weekend will be Friday, Oct. 7, 8 p.m. and Saturday, Oct. 8, 8 p.m. The show will then run Thursday - Sunday evenings, 8 p.m. at The Neill-Cochran House Museum through Sunday, Oct. 23. Tickets for "The Lady From the Sea" available now at The Filigree Theatre website and directly via Eventbrite.

"We are so thrilled to be mounting this site-specific production of Ibsen's The Lady From The Sea in the gardens of the Neill-Cochran House Museum," said Elizabeth V. Newman (Director, Filigree Producing Artistic Director). "There is something unique about mounting the production in a space that is of the same era in which the play is set. There will also be a solo violinist who will guide the audience from location to location around the property for each act of the show, performing traditional Norwegian Folk pieces and traditional Seafaring songs to give the audience a taste of Norway and of life at sea.

"The Lady From The Sea" was originally published in Norway 1888. Incidentally, it is the same year that Filigree's Season 2 Fall Production, "Miss Julie," was published in neighboring Sweden. Both Strindberg's "Miss Julie" and Ibsen's "The Lady From The Sea" address themes that are still hauntingly relevant and poignant today. While some social mores and expectations have, of course, changed in the intervening century and a half, surprisingly, much has not: the question of what power and freedoms women are allowed and what autonomy they have over their own lives and their destinies; what they yearn for and how they wrestle with the consequences of their decisions for themselves and for those around them.

The Filigree Theatre's annual season is structured to connect the Past, Present and Future of theatre over the course of a three-show season. Each season is composed of: FALL (Past) represented by a play from the theatre cannon; WINTER (Present) represented by a play that is the work of a playwright living/working today and SPRING (Future) represented by a play that is a world premiere. Each season is tied together with a common theme that runs throughout the three shows.

Like much of live theatre, Filigree went on hiatus for two years during the height of Covid, postponing our Season Three Spring Production, the World Premiere of LIFTED by Charlie Thurston. Filigree returned to live performance to mount LIFTED in April 2022. Those dark months and years of isolation; of lock-down and separateness across the world, sparked, for many, a feeling akin to being "land-locked," trapped, hemmed in, and a yearning for expansiveness, of escape. A collective ache to experience something like the freedom felt of vast openness of the ocean.

Geographically, Season Four takes audiences from the fjords of Norway in "The Lady From the Sea," to hurricane-battered Coney Island, New York of ten years ago in "Fire in Dreamland" to a contemporary Pacific Northwest coastal town in "Tide."

Performance spaces for The Filigree Theatre this season are all non-traditional/site-specific theatre spaces: The Neill-Cochran House Museum will take on the role of Dr. Wangel's home, overlooking the fjords of Norway in the Fall; a loft-space will serve for the Coney Island apartment in the Winter; and MoonTower Cider Company's Tap Room will double as a Pacific Northwest surfer bar in the Spring. Across this season, the sea will take on many shapes and identities, symbolizing escape, danger, passion. The sea has a vastness and a depth that is unfathomable. It is something before which we stand in awe, and sometimes in fear. We tremble at its power, marvel at its beauty, revel in the treasures it hides, mourn its capacity for destruction and devastation and yearn for the freedom it sometimes seems to promise. The ebb and flow of the sea's shifting tides echo the push and pull of human needs and desires. Audiences will feel the pull and hear the roar of the sea even here in the middle of Central Texas. In each of the works in Filigree's Fourth Season the sea looms large, waiting in the wings just off-stage.

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