Audiences are loving it.  

“You guys have created a masterpiece.”

“Really moving.”

“My favorite show at the Fringe.”

“Not to be missed.”

First time in UK

Gidion’s Knot

is intense, spellbinding drama.

Gidion’s Knot, a new play by Johnna Adams, is perhaps one of the most intense and most intensely personal pieces of theater one might ever encounter.

This breathless piece has audiences gasping from the teacher’s opening “Oh, God,” to the final fade.

Written in response to the backlash of the first widely publicized American mass school shooting, the Massacre at Colorado’s Columbine High School, where two students unleashed a barrage of bullets, killing 12 students and a teacher and injuring 27 more people.  In the aftermath, schools were left to implement new policies to prevent cliques, bullying and other activities that might lead to violence.  Some of these policies went too far.  Johnna Adams’ play, Gidion’s Knot, concerns one such situation – a situation with deadly consequences and lessons for us all.

“This intense, epic, drama details a parent teacher-conference after the unthinkable happens. What is the line between free expression and appropriate social behaviour? This show will make you think, and want to hold your children a little closer. In reaction to one of the first school shootings in the U.S.A., playwright Johnna Adams explores the potential demise of creativity when self-expression is quashed by the thought police in the form of ill-equipped teachers suddenly made responsible for identifying and singling out dangerous youth while simultaneously spurring on inquisitive minds, self-expression and creative thought. Theater doesn’t get more intense than this gripping and powerful meeting of two women well past the bounds of normalcy. Patrons of this all too possible altercation will leave the theater gasping for breath, searching for answers and torn between blaming society, parenting and schooling for the atrocities occurring at American schools. It’s theater that makes you think, theater that makes you feel, theater that confronts the soul.” Quest Theaterworks artistic director Scott Ewing

At first blush, this might look like an American problem.  But terror is on the rise worldwide and the thought police are looking out for YOU.

Gidion’s Knot provides a fresh new context for the age old debate about who is responsible for raising our young people.  Are our young people’s actions the responsibility of their teachers, their parents or society at large? In this play, Gidion is only eleven. Eleven! Yet it’s a situation all too real. Things like this are happening in schools close to where you live.

In the end, this piece is about the nature of creativity, the dangers of artistic expression, and the perils of “putting oneself out there” for all to see, to judge, to mock and to scorn.