{"id":91468,"date":"2025-03-30T06:32:49","date_gmt":"2025-03-30T13:32:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=91468"},"modified":"2025-04-10T09:31:47","modified_gmt":"2025-04-10T16:31:47","slug":"sketches-in-isolation-janine-sobeck-knighton-finds-herself-in-the-beatrix-potter-defense-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/sketches-in-isolation-janine-sobeck-knighton-finds-herself-in-the-beatrix-potter-defense-society\/","title":{"rendered":"Sketches in Isolation: Janine Sobeck Knighton Finds Herself in The Beatrix Potter Defense Society"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Playwright, dramaturg and theater professor Janine Sobeck Knighton at her home office in Provo, Utah. Image by Steve Coray.<\/p><\/div>\n

In its development, not every play needs the same things. Enter the dramaturg\u2014a role that combines the duties of editor, historian, researcher, fact-checker, audience manager, and more. \u201cReally [the job is] to help the playwright do their best version of their play and hopefully enrich people\u2019s experiences,\u201d says Janine Sobeck Knighton, a Utah Valley University professor and professional dramaturg. She’s also a playwright\u2014her newest, The Beatrix Potter Defense Society<\/em>, is being staged this month by Plan-B Theatre in Salt Lake City.<\/h4>\n

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.\u00a0 \u201cIt 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,\u201d Knighton says. \u201cI thought I just had a knack for helping other people figure out their stories. But then I didn\u2019t have any stories of my own.\u201d<\/h4>\n

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\u2014\u201coften the side-characters, the people who didn\u2019t 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.”<\/h4>\n

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. \u201cThat was hard watching the world outside your window,\u201d she says. \u201cI was wanting stories of people who understood that, and I stumbled across Beatrix.\u201d<\/h4>\n
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Sibley Snowden as Beatrix (left) and Flow Bravo as Edith in Plan-B Theatre’s production of The Beatrix Potter Defense Society. <\/em>Image by Sharah Meservy.<\/p><\/div>\n

Beatrix Potter is the author of Peter Rabbit<\/em>, the famous children\u2019s 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. \u201cThey weren\u2019t really allowed friends, they weren\u2019t really allowed out,\u201d Knighton says. \u201cIt was just the two of them, their governess and a lot of animals.\u201d<\/h4>\n

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. \u201cBeatrix 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,\u201d Knighton says.<\/h4>\n

During Beatrix\u2019s young life, the family began summering in the north. \u201cThey would go to these estates and everything changed. They were allowed to roam, they were allowed to be free, to be out,\u201d Knighton says. When she visited the Lake District when she was 16, Potter first recorded in her journals how much she hated it there, \u201cbecause there were too many dead sheep,\u201d but by the end of that summer, she refused to leave, to go back home. \u201cLondon life was very much prison and the Lake District was very much freedom. It\u2019s creativity and her art,\u201d Knighton says. This is the launch point for Knighton\u2019s new play.<\/h4>\n

\u201cI was interested in the isolation aspect and how she became the Beatrix Potter we know today,\u201d Knighton says. \u201cFor 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.\u201d<\/h4>\n

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.\u00a0 \u201cBut she wasn\u2019t allowed to live there because she was a single woman,\u201d Knighton notes. \u201cShe would visit and she wrote a lot of her stories there.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Potter wrote her famous books in her 30s, eventually inventing merchandising out of the stuffed Peter Rabbit, which made her financially independent\u2014quite scandalous for a young woman during Victorian-era gender norms.\u00a0Potter 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\u2014a lesson our hyper-focused industrialized culture on the brink of environmental catastrophe could take a page from.)<\/h4>\n

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\u2014his speeches and the work he did\u2014with brief mentions of a wife, Edith. Reading about Potter and her circle, Knighton found a passage in a biography that struck her\u2014that everything the vicar and Edith did, they did together. “But if they did everything together, where was Edith\u2019s story?\u201d Knighton wondered. \u201c[Edith] could have very easily been erased but I think there is so much there,\u201d Knighton says. She had found her second character, and another story to tell.<\/h4>\n

It was a story that resonated with Knighton\u2019s own. \u201cThis sense [of being] a new wife, and a new mother, and an artist…with this unpaid job of being the Vicar\u2019s wife\u2014that 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,\u201d Knighton says.<\/h4>\n

This wrestling with identity is not a generational thing for women, nor a relic of a time period\u2019s past. It is the nature of living in a patriarchy, whether in Victorian England or Trump\u2019s America\u2014that 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\u2019s fictionalized moment of connection.<\/h4>\n

\u201cI 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\u2019re imagining conversations behind closed doors,\u201d Knighton says. \u201cI think they\u2019re both in a moment of wrestling with their identity, both as people and as artists, so it\u2019s a really lovely moment to put them together.\u201d<\/h4>\n