MEDUSA to Receive First Public Reading as Part of Catherine Filloux's Olivia Trilogy
Jay O. Sanders and Arianna Gayle star in the environmental play's upcoming staged reading.
The Olivia Trilogy will continue with the first public reading of MEDUSA by Catherine Filloux, award-winning playwright and librettist whose career has spanned three decades of urgent, internationally produced work. MEDUSA is the second play in her Olivia Trilogy, with music by Karyn Levitt. The reading takes place Monday, July 13, 2026, at 7 pm in NYC, directed by Alice Reagan and starring Jay O. Sanders and Arianna Gayle.
MEDUSA is a love letter to the environment, to the pioneering ocean conservation organization In The Same Boat (Norway), and to Filloux's own oceanographer father. In it, a young caregiver named Karenna is bound by contract to an ambitious client who cannot bear abandonment. While nursing him for a living, she becomes entrapped, surveilled by security cameras. While her labor pulls her toward an uncharted frontier inspired by a scientist's exploration of the deep. We share more with Karenna than we think.
MEDUSA follows Filloux's landmark first play in the trilogy, OLIVIA, which received its world premiere reading in February 2026 and was praised as "a riveting call-to-action piece" examining inheritance, family legacy, and environmental reckoning (Theatre Beyond Broadway). That event drew a distinguished panel of climate policy experts from the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, Climate Rights International, and In The Same Boat, sparking dialogue that extended far beyond the theater itself.
The trilogy is completed by DEEP TIME, a play written for actors Christine Bruno and Antoinette LaVecchia, in which an established physicist and her partner find their marriage tested as their dreams and fears about the planet collide. DEEP TIME will receive its first reading later in 2026.
Filloux, whose oceanographer father was the first to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a catamaran, has been a passionate advocate against plastic pollution from an early age. Filloux continues her partnership with In The Same Boat (Norway), advocating for young activists https://www.inthesameboat.eco/volunteers/ and advocating for our oceans https://oceana.org
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