{"id":248828,"date":"2026-04-14T07:09:51","date_gmt":"2026-04-14T07:09:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/248828\/"},"modified":"2026-04-14T07:09:51","modified_gmt":"2026-04-14T07:09:51","slug":"how-the-lonely-heart-of-suzanne-vegas-lover-beloved-came-to-austin-the-austin-chronicle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/248828\/","title":{"rendered":"How the Lonely Heart of Suzanne Vega\u2019s Lover, Beloved Came to Austin \u2022 The Austin Chronicle"},"content":{"rendered":"

Austin Film Society has a studio: In fact, it has Austin Studios, seven soundstages on 20 acres in East Austin. But for one very special project, the event space at the AFS Cinema became the unofficial Stage 8.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s where Austin filmmaker Michael Tully filmed Lover, Beloved, capturing sotto voce musical icon Suzanne Vega\u2019s solo stage show. In it, through song and spoken word, she plays Carson McCullers, the trailblazing author of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Reflections in a Golden Eye, and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe. After debuting at South by Southwest in 2022<\/a>, the film is now streaming on PBS.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It was actually South by Southwest and Austin Chronicle co-founder Louis Black (who retired from the paper in 2017) who was the driving force behind the film, and who brought the director of Ping Pong Summer<\/a> and Don\u2019t Leave Home<\/a> to the project. Tully said, \u201cLouis had known Suzanne from her New York era, and this was a lifelong project of hers.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Tully was a longtime fan of McCullers, the writer had fascinated Vega since a pivotal moment when she was an undergraduate at Barnard. Tully said, \u201cIt was this \u2018dress up as a writer\u2019 thing and she saw that infamous picture of Carson McCullers<\/a> and said, \u2018I kinda look like her.\u2019\u201d Vega went on to use McCullers\u2019 short stories as the inspiration for songs and then created a one-act play in which she performed as the author. Three decades later, in 2011, she returned to the part off-Broadway in Carson McCullers Talks About Love at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, in a mixture of original songs and spoken word performance taken from and inspired by McCullers. Then followed an album in 2016, Lover, Beloved: Songs From an Evening with Carson McCullers, and a touring stage revival titled Lover, Beloved. This was when Black saw the show, Tully recalled. \u201cAnd she was telling him, \u2018I think I\u2019m finally done with it, I think I\u2019m finally putting it to bed,\u2019 and he was like, \u2018You should film it for posterity.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s that final version that Tully was charged with capturing \u2013 or rather, with crystalizing into a film. To begin with, the stage play and music were not inviolate. It was to be reworked. The intention was to focus on Vega and her resurrection of McCullers in all her devastating tragedies and swooning joys, her swinging sarcasm and barbed bitterness. (McCullers was never shy about reminding readers how she had paved the way for fellow Southerners like Truman Capote, who she said mimicked her cadence, and Harper Lee, who she accused of \u201cpoaching on my literary preserves.\u201d)<\/p>\n

But for the screen version, tough decisions had to be made, like excising some dialogue and musical moments \u2013 mostly callbacks and digressions that worked in front of a live theatre audience but could feel repetitive in the film version. \u201cThe stage show was 100 minutes,\u201d Tully said, \u201cand I just felt like, for the screen, if we were pushing closer to 80 minutes it would be better served.\u201d<\/p>\n

Moreover, this wasn\u2019t going to be a straightforward recording in front of a theatre crowd, nor an overly elaborate biopic that would expand to fill a whole soundstage. Instead, what they envisioned was a semi-staged solo endeavor, capturing the spirit of Vega\u2019s show.<\/p>\n

\"\"Behind the scenes at the production shoot at AFS Cinema Credit: Alan Berg | Lover, Beloved<\/p>\n

Spring of 2019, Vega and Tully met at the home of producer Alan Berg to get to know each other, where Tully quickly found that the enigmatic chanteuse \u201cis down-to-earth and has a sense of humor and is chill.\u201d Then they and the crew convened at the Vortex Theatre (which, Tully noted, would be the ideal space if they were just doing a three-camera recording of the original show). There, they shot proof-of-concept footage \u2013 \u201cjust one or two songs and a monologue,\u201d Tully said. \u201cIt was more of a test drive, comfort level with Suzanne and the team of, \u2018What does this look like? Can we pull this off?\u2019 rather than a sample to raise the financing.\u201d Luckily, he added, \u201cShe put our faith in us.\u201d<\/p>\n

The team quickly realized that she was taking just as much of a leap as they were. \u201cShe was not shy about being nervous about things,\u201d production designer Lisa Laratta recalled. For someone who had been hugely influenced as an artist by Vega growing up, the proximity to an icon could have been unnerving, but like Tully she was soon put at ease. Laratta said, \u201cShe is so good at songwriting, at being herself on stage. There\u2019s no pretense. It\u2019s just amazing, but she stepped a little out of her comfort zone with writing and acting, and so it was really easy to see that she felt a little vulnerable and was taking a risk, and that was really good to see because I also felt that way.\u201d<\/p>\n

For the actual filming, they settled on the event space at AFS Cinema (for regulars, that\u2019s the hall behind the bar) as a unique studio space, and then they filmed in the fall of 2019. This is when cinematographer Amy Bench came on board for the six-day shoot, and some of the practicalities of filming started to come into focus. The room was basically a black box, and with her theatre background Laratta created small sets around the room to maximize the space. As a result, Bench said, \u201cWe moved and the lights moved.\u201d<\/p>\n

Moreover, since Vega is a musician first and foremost, her singing was captured live, with her pianist and collaborator Jason Hart playing to her through earbuds and Vega functionally singing a capella on set. However, every effort went into minimizing the number of takes to protect her voice. \u201cThree takes for everything, which is pretty low for fiction,\u201d said Bench, especially since almost everything was being shot with a single camera.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s only one song, \u201cNew York Is My Destination,\u201d where the production used a second camera. That extra perspective is fitting, since New York is the setting for the show \u2013 it\u2019s inspired by McCullers\u2019 1954 talk at the 92nd Street Y. However, here that real event is split into two nights, decades apart: one at the beginning of her celebrity fresh off the success of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and another, 25 years later, when her literary career had somewhat faltered and her personal life had become as wrenchingly dramatic as anything in her books. The look of the spaces was in part inspired by research Tully and Laratta did into McCullers\u2019 papers at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, but the intention was never to accurately recreate locations. As Tully put it, \u201cThe stage [of the Y] is really happening and everything else is her memory.\u201d<\/p>\n

The effect is like McCullers\u2019 own reminiscences of stories she has told herself a thousand times. It\u2019s why there\u2019s a certain dream logic to the staging. Laratta said, \u201cThe whole thing is her telling her stories from that stage, so it\u2019s like a little nesting box of \u2018Oh, this memory.\u2019 So I leaned into the idea that she\u2019s telling the stories from her childhood, from her teen years, and maybe her memory isn\u2019t totally filled out, or maybe it\u2019s some kind of a dream, gauzy memory.\u201d<\/p>\n

Take the childhood kitchen that McCullers drifts into during one anecdote: While it was one of the sets they spent the most time on, Laratta said, \u201cWe didn\u2019t put a sink in, we didn\u2019t put a table in. It was this strange idea of making a memory instead of making something that felt real, and that was really liberating.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lover, Beloved is streaming now on PBS.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A note to readers:\u00a0Bold and uncensored,\u00a0The Austin Chronicle\u00a0has been Austin\u2019s independent news source for over 40 years, expressing the community\u2019s political and environmental concerns and supporting its active cultural scene. Now more than ever, we need your support to continue supplying Austin with independent, free press. If real news is important to you, please consider making a donation of $5, $10 or whatever you can afford, to help keep our journalism on stands. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Austin Film Society has a studio: In fact, it has Austin Studios, seven soundstages on 20 acres in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":248829,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[132,134,133,6672,1551,94545,94546,94547],"class_list":["post-248828","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-austin","tag-austin","tag-austin-headlines","tag-austin-news","tag-beloved","tag-feature","tag-lover","tag-michael-tully","tag-suzanne-vega"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248828","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=248828"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248828\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/248829"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=248828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=248828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=248828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}