Ain't Behavin'

An intense psychological drama about two brothers in an interrogation facility with a pair of detectives, The Pillowman raises disturbing questions about totalitarianism, censorship, freedom of speech, and the human need to understand life through stories. McDonagh’s prize-winning play combines a Kafka-esque plotline with the surreal violence of a David Lynch film and the poetic stealth of a Sam Shepard play. It’s a dark, gorgeous, haunting script. “It’s twisted! It’s fucked up!” Knox exclaims, her face lighting up like a kid’s at Christmas. “I saw it in New York, and I don’t usually direct plays I’ve seen, but this was the most complete theatrical experience I’ve ever had. I’m very excited to direct it.” The play stars Jim Lichtscheidl, Grant Richey, Luverne Seifert, and Chris Carlson.

Knox’s path to theatrical life was both conventional and unconventional, as most such paths are. At Grinnell, Knox originally majored in chemistry, but switched to a double major in English and theater. She got into theater on a whim—she’d done only a musical in high school, a decidedly un-Knoxian production of Bye, Bye Birdie. She ended up directing her first theater piece in college because, she says, she had the “least experience” and no one else working on the project wanted the job.

Knox earned a master of fine arts in directing from the University of Washington. She became enamored of the work of downtown New York troupe Mabou Mines (the same company that brought its bizarre deconstruction of A Doll’s House to the Walker in 2003). Lee Breuer, one of the founders of Mabou Mines, was particularly inspiring, as were experimental companies such as The Wooster Group and German playwright Bertolt Brecht. Knox spent her postgraduate years in Finland as a Fulbright scholar, which allowed her to see a great deal of international and Eastern European theater. She realized then that she didn’t want to direct regional theater—she wanted “to do something in the world that mattered.”

When she came home to Minnesota in 1985, she began searching for artists, per the advice of Breuer, who had similar ideals and aesthetics. “The people I started working with in Minneapolis didn’t set out to start a theater company, we set out to do a play,” she explains. “The whole point was to challenge ourselves and go against the complacency that was in local theater at the time.” A couple of shows later—the first was Farmyard, about a family’s attempts to deal with the unplanned pregnancy of their mentally retarded daughter; the second was Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Katzelmacher, a disturbing exploration of racism among lower-class youths—and Knox had de facto started a theater company.