The Beatrix Potter Defense Society at Plan-B Theatre in the Studio Theatre @ The Rose

THE BEATRIX POTTER DEFENSE SOCIETY by Janine Sobeck Knighton (March 27-April 13) explores the teenage life of Beatrix Potter. And now you’re thinking of Peter Rabbit. As anyone would.

But Beatrix Potter (played by Sibley Snowden) was much more than Peter Rabbit. She was a literary subversive, employing the interplay between the wild and domestic worlds to help her worldwide readership view and interact with the natural world differently.

Meet the Beatrix Potter you didn't know you didn't know.

Much of her story lies in the journal where she sketched the artwork that would become synonymous with her name. But her real story lives in the coded text accompanying those sketches, coded text that chronicles both her discovery and harnessing of her personal power, anathema to Victorian gender norms.

Although much is made historically of how Beatrix’s connection to the vicar Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley enhanced her writing career, there are also hints that his wife Edith (played by Flo Bravo) was Beatrix’s true guide. Yet it’s virtually impossible to find information about her. It’s as if she’s been erased.

THE BEATRIX POTTER DEFENSE SOCIETY explores that erasure in an attempt to crack the code of how Edith and Beatrix may have set each other on anarchic-for-the-times journeys of artistic independence.

CAST & CREATIVE
Playwright: Janine Sobeck Knighton
Actors: Flo Bravo as Edith & Sibley Snowden as Beatrix
Director: Cheryl Ann Cluff
Costume Designer: Victoria Bird
Lighting Designer: Emma Belnap
Props Designer: Arika Schockmel
Projections Designer: Daniel Charon
Scenic Designer: Janice Chan
Sound Designer: Cheryl Ann Cluff
Stage Manager: Taylor Wallace
Scenic Builder & Electrician: David Knoell

READ MORE
Our website
Digital playbill
Study Guide (created for grades 9-12 but you'll enjoy it too)
Blog Post from playwright Janine Sobeck Knighton