Playwright, dramaturg and theater professor Janine Sobeck Knighton at her home office in Provo, Utah. Image by Steve Coray.
In its development, not every play needs the same things. Enter the dramaturg—a role that combines the duties of editor, historian, researcher, fact-checker, audience manager, and more. “Really [the job is] to help the playwright do their best version of their play and hopefully enrich people’s experiences,” says Janine Sobeck Knighton, a Utah Valley University professor and professional dramaturg. She’s also a playwright—her newest, The Beatrix Potter Defense Society, is being staged this month by Plan-B Theatre in Salt Lake City.
Knighton acted in her first play in fourth grade, studied theatre at university, and turned her passion for the stage into a professional career. She began at the Arena Stage in Washington D.C., and eventually became their full-time Literary Manager, Dramaturg and Producer of New Works. A dramaturg can enter at any point of the playwriting process, working with the playwright over drafts, through feedback sessions of what is working and what is not working. “It is a lot of research and working with the cast and creative team and the audience to make sure everybody is on the same page and having a really great experience,” Knighton says. “I thought I just had a knack for helping other people figure out their stories. But then I didn’t have any stories of my own.”
Stories are a sanctuary for Knighton. Often feeling like the forgotten narrative she frequently portrays in her plays, Knighton uses stories as a way to find connection, to find friends among the characters—“often the side-characters, the people who didn’t have the shiny traditional story,” she says. “I always wanted to know more about them. Certainly as a female, I am very drawn to female stories that have so often been overlooked.”
During the slow emergence out of Covid, Knighton was in the middle of a high-risk pregnancy. She found herself in isolation while the world around her was finally opening back up. “That was hard watching the world outside your window,” she says. “I was wanting stories of people who understood that, and I stumbled across Beatrix.”
Sibley Snowden as Beatrix (left) and Flow Bravo as Edith in Plan-B Theatre’s production of The Beatrix Potter Defense Society. Image by Sharah Meservy.
Beatrix Potter is the author of Peter Rabbit, the famous children’s books chronicling the antics of a young bunny. During her childhood in Victorian England, Potter and her brother were kept intentionally isolated by their parents in their home’s upstairs nursery. “They weren’t really allowed friends, they weren’t really allowed out,” Knighton says. “It was just the two of them, their governess and a lot of animals.”
Although the children were kept isolated, their parents and governess highly encouraged their passions and interests, fostering their curiosity in animals and science, art and creativity. Beatrix always used sketchbooks, recording her dedication to her practice even as a young girl. Through sketches and drawings and eventually paintings and watercolors, Beatrix refined her talents. “Beatrix was an amateur mycologist [an expert in fungi] and she did all of these watercolors that are still used today because they are so accurate,” Knighton says.
During Beatrix’s young life, the family began summering in the north. “They would go to these estates and everything changed. They were allowed to roam, they were allowed to be free, to be out,” Knighton says. When she visited the Lake District when she was 16, Potter first recorded in her journals how much she hated it there, “because there were too many dead sheep,” but by the end of that summer, she refused to leave, to go back home. “London life was very much prison and the Lake District was very much freedom. It’s creativity and her art,” Knighton says. This is the launch point for Knighton’s new play.
“I was interested in the isolation aspect and how she became the Beatrix Potter we know today,” Knighton says. “For me, it circled around this first moment, how she went from hating it to being a huge champion of the area and writing most of her stories there.”
Potter fell in love there. Her parents refused to give their approval for the match, and he died far too young of undiagnosed leukemia. So, out of her love for the lakes and her grief for her beloved, she bought land there, Hilltop Farm. “But she wasn’t allowed to live there because she was a single woman,” Knighton notes. “She would visit and she wrote a lot of her stories there.”
Potter wrote her famous books in her 30s, eventually inventing merchandising out of the stuffed Peter Rabbit, which made her financially independent—quite scandalous for a young woman during Victorian-era gender norms. Potter became a renowned farmer in the area, and began using her money to buy up plots of land around the Lakes District to prevent their development (read: demise). Because she bequeathed it all to the national trust, that whole area is pretty much protected now. (A capitalist start ends up working for the stewardship of the land—a lesson our hyper-focused industrialized culture on the brink of environmental catastrophe could take a page from.)
In her pursuit of preserving and protecting the land, Potter meets Vicar Hardwick Rawnsley, who became a huge champion of her as an artist. The historical record includes numerous accounts of the Vicar—his speeches and the work he did—with brief mentions of a wife, Edith. Reading about Potter and her circle, Knighton found a passage in a biography that struck her—that everything the vicar and Edith did, they did together. “But if they did everything together, where was Edith’s story?” Knighton wondered. “[Edith] could have very easily been erased but I think there is so much there,” Knighton says. She had found her second character, and another story to tell.
It was a story that resonated with Knighton’s own. “This sense [of being] a new wife, and a new mother, and an artist…with this unpaid job of being the Vicar’s wife—that wrestling with your identity, with this role you have, wrestling with if I am a bad mother if I pursue my art? Do I have to put that away so I can do these other things? Certainly as a mother myself, those are questions that are very poignant to me,” Knighton says.
This wrestling with identity is not a generational thing for women, nor a relic of a time period’s past. It is the nature of living in a patriarchy, whether in Victorian England or Trump’s America—that women have to grapple with being a mother, a career person, an artist, all of the above. These women all use their practice as an act of defiance and empowerment, bolstering them against Victorian gender norms, against contemporary patriarchy, giving them the confidence to become the women we know today. Edith the adult, and Beatrix the defiant 16-year old, have to grapple with their individual identities and their place in society, a struggle that ultimately brings them together in this play’s fictionalized moment of connection.
“I have created an encounter between the two of them that, could it have happened? Sure. Do we have a record of it? No. As all good historical fiction goes, you’re imagining conversations behind closed doors,” Knighton says. “I think they’re both in a moment of wrestling with their identity, both as people and as artists, so it’s a really lovely moment to put them together.”
Original artwork by Beatrix Potter
Knighton uses their art as a way to work through these tribulations and to create something for other people to relate to as well. “The art was necessary for the storytelling. Because to truly understand both of these women, you have to be able to see their art,” Knighton says. Based on primary sources like Beatrix’s sketchbooks, images of Potter’s early work are projected during the play. The playwright also includes words in the script from Beatrix’s decoded journals. “I rooted the story in as much information as I had. It helps me make sure I am being true to who she is as far as we know her. Because yes, it’s my own version of Beatrix, but I do want to be as authentic to who I actually believe she was as possible.”
Beatrix is a spitfire, she is stubborn. She endeavored in pursuits that a woman of her class simply did not do in Victorian England. Her art let her execute this rebellious spirit with purpose and dedication, not taking no for an answer. “My awareness of who she became certainly infuses the conversations that happen in the play,” Knighton says. “There is quite a bit of speculation that Beatrix Potter became the writer that she did because of the childhood that she had. Because they were allowed to pursue their passions, spending a lot of time painting and drawing.” Isolation is a catalyst for deeper pursuits. (Like the concept expressed in Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own”—for a woman to be able to have the mental freedom to think independently and autonomously and to have deeper thoughts, she needs to have a room of one’s own, and 500 pounds a year, not just be in the sitting room in perpetuity, with everyone in the house coming in and out, constantly interrupting, so one never gets deeper than the surface because the patriarchy doesn’t want us to see the cracks in their antithetical system.)
“The play came out of a very particular moment in my life and in my own questions,” Knighton says. “So as a piece of advice for young playwrights, don’t worry too much about trying to write a story you think someone else wants. Follow your own curiosity: what are the stories, the people, the characters, the themes—whatever—that really lights you up.”
Scenic Design forThe Beatrix Potter Defense Society by Janice Chan. Image by Sharah Meservy.
The Beatrix Potter Defense Society, Plan-B Theatre, Salt Lake City, through April 13.
Genevieve Vahl is a writer, farmer and artist from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her writing focuses on how art and community intersect, how to bring access to food and covering climate solutions around the Salt Lake Valley. She also writes poetry, binds artist books, makes paper and runs cyanotype prints from film.
Categories: Theater
