Jim Knable

MASTER WILDER AND THE CABALA is both an adaptation of "Our Town" playwright Thornton Wilder's first novel and a fantasy about its writing based on evidence and speculation. Commissioned by the Thornton Wilder Estate, it features TW as the central character, a bright and ambitious writer making a living as a French teacher in a private high school in New Jersey in 1925. His students and one of their stowaway girlfriends wonder what he's up to in his house master's attic until he involves them in the novel-writing itself, first through play-acting scenes with them, then by basing characters and their romantic tragedies on their lives. Wilder's controlling father and liberating mother visit him and complete the cast, both of the play and of the characters who form the interlacing narrative of the novel. Wilder masks his own drama and even sexuality through his emerging novel, but the real people in his life see through it and him and force him to finally break free from all that traps him to become the universal writer capable of transcending time. The kaleidoscope of a play can be enjoyed with or without knowledge of Wilder and his many works, but it is likely that audiences will want to at least learn more about him after seeing the play.

A meeting between Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Dickens really happened. But the rest - a shared Raven, a bewitching Muse (Virginia, the teen-cousin wife of Poe), and the effect these two literary Titans had on each other is the great mystery. It's 1842 and the future flies on dark wings.

Painter Abigail’s model is a naked man painted green, and her architect husband Ronald’s new intern bears a striking resemblance, though he’s clothed. Their new acquaintance, Genice, is a stone sculptor of gargoyles whose musician fiancé appears in the same hue. Who the Green Man is to each of them is a mystery only they can help each other unravel. A play about love, loss and other things made of stone.

The disillusioned best man meets the disheveled matron of honor after a hippie wedding in New Mexico and they reenact the rituals of all men and women around a campfire with booze, knives, and lizards. An honest conversation and primal transformation in one long scene.

A modern day struggling magician uses Houdini's greatest acts to get through a personal crisis with his partner's sick son. A play about love, magic and modern medicine.

Two close friends and college roommates, one Northern and one Southern, in the spring of 1861, find themselves divided by the Civil War. The Southern boy gets involved in a dangerous plot to raise a flag of Secession on the Northern college's church spire, while the Northern boy carries on a secret affair with the college Reverend's abolition-minded daughter. When an older Southern student convinces the Southern roommate to involve the Reverend's daughter in a further plot, the violence of the coming war rears its head and pits the two roommates against each other. Based on real events at Yale in the same year, the play explores the clashes between personal friendship and family loyalty, compassionate love and youthful lust, and even Darwinian evolution and Christian certitude. The play asks how far one can go to stay true to one's closest companions when outside forces can't be kept from their divisive work.

In the past: Burt and Gloria were in the midst of trying to deal with their son’s adolescence when something terrible and hard to talk about happened to Gloria.
In the present: Burt and Gloria are struggling to maintain their marriage and struggling to communicate with their son. Burt and Gloria’s friend Lisa have started an affair based on their inability to respond to what happened to Gloria. Evan knows and doesn’t want to know what happened to his mother, wants to know but doesn’t want to know what is happening to his pubescent body, and is not getting straight answers from anybody.
In the future: Burt will teach Evan how to be a fencer, Gloria will teach Evan how to be a man, Lisa will try to teach her class lessons about men, women, and silence, and Evan will become The Rapier of Europa.

A white motorcycle cop gets a flat tire on the freeway and ends up at a black female mechanic’s autoshop. Then her son Atreus shows up. A modern Greek Tragedy without a chorus.

Barbara, recently deserted by her husband of five years, discovers a Conquistador in her living room. Though she has had vivid fantasies about Spain, the Conquistador and his cruel and bloodthirsty approach to life were never part of them... until now. Through him and a maze of real and imaginary characters--including her best friend Diversion, a Mayan Ancient, and a very familiar guitar player--Barbara sorts through the leftovers and finds her Duende.

It all starts with Ted’s plan for a novel about modern class struggle, then his private school-issue laptop with highly personal creative notes is stolen. In this delightfully improbable– but highly possible– urban tragi-farce, the lower, middle, and upper classes of New York City entangle themselves in a case of mistaken projections and confused identities.

A frank, honest, and even funny examination of an affair between a high school band teacher and his student and how it reverberates with her ex-boyfriend, another student, and his ex-girlfriend, the English teacher.

Morris, who looks white but says he's black, is adjusting to college life—attending the diversity retreat, meeting his first girlfriend, bonding over pizza and papers with his roommate—when his mom shows up and implies that Morris might not actually be black. The play is an exploration of what race means when you can't tell what it is or trust its source. It is also a simple story about three college friends who are forced to deal with honesty, love, and compromises in the most confusing time of their lives, at a most confusing time in our “post-racial” era.

In the Elizabethan mixed-up tradition, OTHAMLET takes elements and characters obviously inspired by Shakespeare (with a smattering of William Blake and other later influences), to create a new more contemporarily relevant drama of epically tragi-comic proportions. Othamlet is a king with no memory of how he became one; his wife Lady McDeath and his trusty advisor Ego contrive to embroil him in a scandal with the captive Pleopatra when he starts asking questions; Othamlet and Pleopatra escape to an island controlled by exiled Prosiris who has an unbearably chaste daughter named Beatitude and a white monster of his accidental creation named Rintrah. Those who have been cast off return to take back a kingdom, and all things, if not set right, are rearranged towards a more promising end. A new tale is told from the scraps of old ones and the Tool begs our forgiveness for it and hopes for our pleasure from it.

Jason's father has just died, but he prefers to focus on his latest theory that he is a distant descendent of West Ford, George Washington's rumored illegitimate slave son. While his mother and their family rabbi friend grieve and renegotiate their relationship, Jason, a bright young man who can’t quite help insulting everyone around him, pours his efforts into turning his high school group project on The Odyssey into an epic reimagining of the American creation myth with the help and hindrance of his long-suffering Japanese-American friend Gerald and their Columbian classmate Yulieth. As the project progresses under Jason’s manic creativity, his own immediate lineage is called into question and his friends and family become players in his efforts to grapple with his identity. A play about the intimate and troubled relationship almost all of us have with this country's roots, and our own, The Americaniad is also about how we might move forward, as envisioned by a teenager on the spectrum of imagination.

A North Korean fighter pilot defects to a small country in the middle of China which is ruled over by a hunchback who keeps the former Queen of Egypt a prisoner. The pilot's wife and her torturer defect and join him and they create a new society after accidentally overthrowing the Hunchback. Then the pilot's son tracks his parents down and demands to be given a second childhood. Nuclear holocaust, or something like it, ensues.