How the Lonely Heart of Suzanne Vega’s Lover, Beloved Came to Austin

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.

That’s where Austin filmmaker Michael Tully filmed Lover, Beloved, capturing sotto voce musical icon Suzanne Vega’s 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, the film is now streaming on PBS.org.

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 and Don’t Leave Home to the project. Tully said, “Louis had known Suzanne from her New York era, and this was a lifelong project of hers.”

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, “It was this ‘dress up as a writer’ thing and she saw that infamous picture of Carson McCullers and said, ‘I kinda look like her.’” Vega went on to use McCullers’ 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. “And she was telling him, ‘I think I’m finally done with it, I think I’m finally putting it to bed,’ and he was like, ‘You should film it for posterity.’”

It’s that final version that Tully was charged with capturing – 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 “poaching on my literary preserves.”)

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

Moreover, this wasn’t 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’s show.

Behind the scenes at the production shoot at AFS Cinema Credit: Alan Berg | Lover, Beloved

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 “is down-to-earth and has a sense of humor and is chill.” 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 – “just one or two songs and a monologue,” Tully said. “It was more of a test drive, comfort level with Suzanne and the team of, ‘What does this look like? Can we pull this off?’ rather than a sample to raise the financing.” Luckily, he added, “She put our faith in us.”

The team quickly realized that she was taking just as much of a leap as they were. “She was not shy about being nervous about things,” 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, “She is so good at songwriting, at being herself on stage. There’s no pretense. It’s 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.”

For the actual filming, they settled on the event space at AFS Cinema (for regulars, that’s 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, “We moved and the lights moved.”

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. “Three takes for everything, which is pretty low for fiction,” said Bench, especially since almost everything was being shot with a single camera.

There’s only one song, “New York Is My Destination,” where the production used a second camera. That extra perspective is fitting, since New York is the setting for the show – it’s inspired by McCullers’ 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’ papers at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, but the intention was never to accurately recreate locations. As Tully put it, “The stage [of the Y] is really happening and everything else is her memory.”

The effect is like McCullers’ own reminiscences of stories she has told herself a thousand times. It’s why there’s a certain dream logic to the staging. Laratta said, “The whole thing is her telling her stories from that stage, so it’s like a little nesting box of ‘Oh, this memory.’ So I leaned into the idea that she’s telling the stories from her childhood, from her teen years, and maybe her memory isn’t totally filled out, or maybe it’s some kind of a dream, gauzy memory.”

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, “We didn’t put a sink in, we didn’t 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.”

Lover, Beloved is streaming now on PBS.org.

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