Theater preview: Plan-B Theatre Company's The Beatrix Potter Defense Society 

• Sarah Meservy
• Sibley Snowden and Flo Bravo in The Beatrix Potter Defense Society

Time in isolation can inspire all manner of intriguing creative outlets. Such was the case with Beatrix Potter, the beloved author of The Tale of Peter Rabbit and other stories, and the subject of the new play The Beatrix Potter Defense Society. It was also true of the play's author, Janine Sobeck Knighton, in the origins of the play itself.

Knighton, an author and faculty member at Utah Valley University, was experiencing a high-risk pregnancy in 2020, and continued to remain in lockdown for precautionary reasons even as Utah was beginning to open up while the COVID pandemic lingered.

"I had to stay in isolation longer, and that was really hard," Knighton recalls. "So I started looking for stories of people who had been in isolation, to try to find some kindred spirits."

She found one in Beatrix Potter, whom Knighton discovered had been kept with her brother mostly locked up in their nursery in London—eventually with many pets—for much of their childhood. The exception came during summer stays in the country, allowing young Beatrix a rare liberation. The Beatrix Potter Defense Society captures Beatrix during one of these summers in the Lake District of England, at the age of 16 in 1882, interacting with another real-life figure, the painter Edith Rawnsley.

Knighton learned about these summer visits while researching Potter's philanthropic efforts buying land in the Lake District to preserve it from development. "She had written a lot of her books from there, but was born in London, so I was curious what had taken her to that place," Knighton says. "I discovered this isolation her parents had put her in really only happened when they were in London. The summers offered this sense of freedom, and being able to be truly herself. ... I was fascinated with the idea of how that childhood led to the famous children's author we know."

As a famous public figure, Beatrix Potter has already been the subject of many fictionalized interpretations, and Knighton acknowledges that she was familiar with some of them, including the 2008 biopic Miss Potter starring Renée Zellweger. For Knighton, however, it was important not to focus on those other interpretations, and to stick to primary source materials and non-fiction biographies in her research. Most significantly, she wanted to capture Beatrix at a particular point in her life—as a teenager, trying to understand who she wanted to become. And to accomplish that, she emulated her subject.

"I'm doing one of the things Beatrix did: Respect the age," Knighton says. "One of the things that made her successful as an artist is that she respected the children she wrote for, down to designing the books to be small so that they'd fit in their hands. As a writer, I'm always trying to tap into my connection with that character—my own memories of really struggling with who I am. [Beatrix] has this sense that her life can be more, but she has obstacles she doesn't really know how to get around. I think that's true of 16-year-olds, but it's also true of 30-year-olds, and 50-year-olds."

One of the details about young Beatrix Potter's life that fascinated Knighton was the existence of a journal she kept in her youth, written in a substitution cipher—one that was discovered and decoded only after the author's death in 1943. It offered an insight into the idea that Beatrix felt she might need to keep hidden the person she was becoming.

"One of the kind of questions that the play is exploring is, Beatrix wrestling with her identity as an artist, and what kind of art she's going to do," Knighton says. "And a bit of fear about the art she feels compelled to do. She was trained in the style, which was very common at the time, of ... looking at the world, and copying it exactly. ... This sense of going beyond what you see, and more what you imagine, is what I'm exploring. This idea that she had some hesitation of revealing all aspects of herself—her thoughts and her process—definitely plays into how the story plays out."

Even as an adult, Potter found herself encountering obstacles to her interests, which included science as well as illustration and storytelling. For many years, she devoted herself to the study of mycology—mushrooms—creating detailed watercolors of her subjects and attempting to submit scientific papers that were rejected because she was a woman.

"She was supporting a theory of another scientist who was seen as pretty radical at the time, but did turn out to be true," Knighton notes. "She had already written Peter Rabbit at that time, which started as a letter to a former governess to entertain [the governess's] sick child. ... She was already telling those stories, but whether she would have continued it if she had been able to do something with her science ... that's a question I hope to ask her some day."