Poetic yet cruel: Johnna Adams’s play confronts and explores emotions many face

By Lee Juillerat for Ashland.news

Tense, compelling, often discomforting.

“Gidion’s Knot,” the new offering by the Rogue Theater Company, is 90 minutes of intense confrontation as two women, Heather, a fifth-grade teacher, and Corryn, the mother of Gideon, one of Heather’s students, meet for a parent-teacher conference.

As the play opens, Heather is silently, hysterically weeping. When Corryn arrives, she requests information why her son, Gidion, was suspended from school. Heather, obviously distraught, provides no answers. Their talk quickly evolves from cordial to confrontational, with Heather eventually saying she is waiting for the school principal. Corryn refuses to wait but, instead, relentlessly persists, angrily demanding answers from the obviously distraught Heather.

Written by Johnna Adams and directed by Terri McMahon, “Gidion” features Erica Sullivan as Corryn and Domenique Lozano as Heather. They make their characters real, often painfully so. The simple, stripped down in-the-round staging in the intimate Grizzly Peak theater places a greater focus on the performers, the words they speak and, even more eloquently, their body language. Making what happens bitingly real are Lozano and Sullivan, who give compelling, often painfully real performances as Corryn and Heather.

“Gidion” is challenging for audiences because of its intensity and the questions it asks — questions with no simple answers. The play explores human emotions.

As Jessica Sage, the Rogue Theater’s artistic director notes, “‘Gidion’s Knot’ is a powerful, tense exploration of grief, guilt, and the complexities of communication. It weaves a delicate, emotionally charged dialogue between a mother and a teacher, unraveling deep-seated pain while questioning the nature of responsibility. As layers of misunderstanding are peeled away, the play leaves the audience reflecting on the fragility of human connections and the weight of unspeakable truths.”

As the truths about Gidion’s suspension are revealed, issues emerge about freedom of speech and cyberbullying. The discussion becomes even more intense, with Corryn and Heather both displaying a range of emotions — despair and pride, anger and annoyance. Corryn taunts become more aggressive when she learns that Heather — who appears to be in her late 40s or 50s — has been a teacher for only two years after working previously in advertising. After challenging Heather to guess her profession, Corryn reveals that she is a professor of literature at Northwestern University, with an emphasis on medieval poetry.

Eventually, after increasingly fierce verbal assaults by Corryn, Heather produces the essay that Gidion wrote for a class assignment. Heather refuses to read it, demanding Heather read it aloud, which she does. Gidion’s writing is poetic but also graphically pornographic, cruel and terrifyingly violent. After the reading Corryn — much to most of the audience’s surprise — declares, “This is magnificent! … This is wonderful writing! Strong! Fearless! Fierce! Brave! Cruel!”

Corryn then lambasts Heather, scathingly criticizing her, the school and the educational system, declaring with vicious verbal venom, “I put him here. Into a pit. Full of the unenlightened. Into the hands of the unconventional.”

In trying to explain her actions, Heather tells Corryn, “Sometimes there are situations in life when you want do something very much but you just can’t.” “No,” quickly counters Corryn, “there are situations where you don’t do what you want!”

The play’s title, “Gidion’s Knot,” refers to ancient Greek mythology associated with Alexander the Great. Recall that Corryn teaches medieval poetry. According to legend, the Gordian Knot was a legendary knot “that became a metaphor for an intractable problem solved by a bold stroke. In the popular version of the legend, after unsuccessfully trying to untie the intricate knot, Alexander drew his sword and sliced it in half.”

Alexander may have found a simple way to undo the knot, but the play offers no easy answers to the questions it asks.

“The play is hard. The play is real. There are no answers,” McMahon, “Gidion’s” director said during a talk-back after the play. 

As much as the play offers no easy answers, “Gidion’s Knot” is play that doesn’t end when the performance does — it’s far too thought-provoking to.

Through its poignant dialogue, staging and the two actors’ performances, “Gidion’s Knot” challenges audiences to think and reflect, to consider that “truth” has no clear definition, and to realize that Gidion-like knots can’t simply be sliced in half.

Email freelance writer Lee Juillerat at [email protected].