Krista Knight & Leah Lowe

“Rocky Horror meets Coal Miner's Daughter meets Natural Born Killers.” That’s how playwright Krista Knight describes her new musical, Sloppy Bonnie, premiering at Nashville’s OZ Arts this month.

Knight and director Leah Lowe sat down with us to talk about the play, chicken costumes and the ever-complicated South. Lowe and Knight are two-thirds of the production team behind Sloppy Bonnie, with composer Barry Brinegar as the third.

Lowe and Knight are a charismatic and well-balanced duo — a kind of dramaturgical yin and yang.

Knight is from California. Lowe is from Tennessee. Knight brings the humor and trepidation of her initial experiences of the South to the play. Lowe brings first-hand knowledge of the intricate ways feminine identity is seen and expressed in the South.

Lowe is the theatre department chair at Vanderbilt University and well-ensconced in academic theatre, with a specialty in theories of comedy and of gender performance in theatre. Knight is a pink-haired maverick known for incisive genre-bending plays filled with death cults, fatal dance competitions and occasional cameos by the devil.

Sloppy Bonnie is the story of a young woman, the titular Bonnie (aka Sloppy Bonnie, when she’s had a few drinks) as she makes a cross-country road trip and becomes an accidental serial killer along the way. And occasionally turns into a chicken. All set to country music. In a parking lot.

So where does a “A Roadkill Musical for the Modern Chick,” as OZ Arts has dubbed it, come from anyway?

“Three years ago, I was moving from New York City to Nashville,” Knight explains. “And I was back in California at this silent playwrights retreat that was very much about mining your own personal histories … So, I went straight from moving to the South, you know, like, ‘I'm in the South, the South is dangerous. Everybody has a gun. People are drag racing’ — I had to jump off the road to get out of the way of drag racers in Siloam Springs, Arkansas. I was like, ‘the South is dangerous’ … And then also when I got to Nashville, and sort of settled in, I was like, ‘I'm also dangerous to the South.’ Both in the sense of like, I might literally run you over with my 1972 car that I got in Oklahoma that I can't drive. Or, I'm gonna mix things up, or whatever. So I'm thinking about that. I'm thinking about all the interesting people I'm meeting along the road… I wrote a really incomprehensible draft about a woman who's just tearing through the South, trying to get to her man … Now, it makes a lot more sense. But it was very weird. It was a very dreamlike first draft, where she's just going through the South and killing people through her sort of female incompetence.”

“The play is genuinely fascinated and interested in the South,” Lowe adds. “It's not one of those sort of satires of Southern life. It actually takes up questions about, in this kind of world, where does the power lie and how does power manifest itself in different kinds of ways? But it is a very funny play. It's not a play in which people are going to feel super alienated. Or as though they specifically are being the targets of comedy. It's a friendly comedic exploration of some really kind of serious situations.”

Lowe and Knight met at Vanderbilt University, where Knight is serving as a writer-in-residence, and workshopped the initial incarnation of Sloppy Bonnie with a combined cohort of playwriting students, devising students, Brinegar and a professional actor.

“We came together and worked on this thing,” Lowe explains. “They would have new pages, there was a lot of staging things on the fly. There was a lot of like, ‘nope, that doesn't work, it’s out.’ I think the students made some really valuable contributions.”

“And then, and then, you know, with COVID, and no theatre, Krista and I last semester, we were just meeting once a week just to talk because we were lonely and bored.” Lowe adds. “And we could revisit performances we had seen. And then Vanderbilt had this great grant opportunity for people whose research had been impacted by COVID. So we were able to get some funding.”

With the help of funding from Vanderbilt Strong and The Curb Center, Sloppy Bonnie will premiere at OZ Arts on May 20, with 3 actors performing more than a dozen roles. It will be staged outside for both COVID safety and effect — it’s the perfect play for a parking lot.

Cont’d after photo

Sloppy Bonnie cast (l to r) Curtis Reed, Amanda Disney, James Rudolph II - photo by Tiffany Bessire

“I always knew I wanted to rope you into sloppy Bonnie in a parking lot,” Knight says to Lowe. “Because that's all you need for Sloppy Bonnie is a parking lot.

Though the play is fun, bigger-than-life and deliciously absurd, it remains at its heart a play about self-discovery, gender roles and expectations, and how we do or don’t come to terms with past trauma.

“It's a road trip play,” Lowe says. “And, like all good road trip plays, it's about the traveler finding herself, right? People are not who they seem to be. Our protagonist is not who she seems to be, and what she thinks is going to be her destination [isn’t] her destination at all. But one of the things that's happened in this version of it is that the music has just been really beautifully developed by Barry Brinegar, who has just really taken this vast kind of country music vocabulary, and delightfully picked really iconic musical motifs to explore Bonnie's gradual transformation.”

“I grew up in the South,” she adds. “So for Krista, coming to the South was an exploration of a new world, right. But for me, it's an exploration of a world that I know very well. Southern femininity, you just soak it up through your pores as you're growing up in a little town on a mountain in Tennessee, you know? So … I feel like there's a lot about this world that I know, really well. And I think maybe this is an obsession that Krista and I share, an obsession with thinking about what femininity is, what it really is, in terms of a series of behaviors and attitudes, but also, how does it intersect with the world?”

Knight says, “I'm interested in evoking change. Of course I am. But that doesn't happen for me by going to a play and being like, ‘oh, things were terrible for her. It just keeps getting worse.’ You know? I would much rather see her happening and, through that, see the cage, as opposed to like, ‘oh, no, she's just being crushed by it the whole time. And then she's not in some way that is easy somehow, and trauma-free.’”

“So one of the things that we see with Bonnie is: female agency, bad choices,” Lowe says. “It's not a typical feminist tale … when we think of feminist drama, we think of a play in which the woman triumphs. And there's an explicit political critique involved, and the audience goes home, understanding that, you know, women are good and powerful or whatever, right? This is way more twisted, and way more funny, and way more nuanced than that. Bonnie probably wouldn't describe herself as a feminist at all, certainly at the beginning of the play. And yet, through the course of the play, we see her developing a sense of agency, and becoming disenchanted with the kind of guardrails that have defined her existence.”

“I love that we're asking an audience to embrace the interior of a serial killer,” Knight says. “We are asking them to experience a story through her point of view, right? … I think that there's something really important about about, asking people to understand this very peculiar person who they are not. And I want them to walk away saying, ‘yep, I see why she did it.’”

Did we mention that Bonnie occasionally turns into a chicken? We’ll leave the whys and wherefores up to you to discover (no spoilers here), but Knight points to an interesting parallel when discussing her roots in theatre.

“I originally got into theater through doing it in my church, and through the pageantry of that — the Christmas pageants. And one of my first memories of doing theater is … I really wanted to be cast as Mary, and I get cast a chicken. And it's like, why is a chicken even in there? But my mom would go all out with whatever I was doing. So I was a chicken in the Christmas [pageant], and I was the best looking chicken. I mean, my costume was amazing. And I was like, parading with the wise man. Why? Who knows? But it was so important to me. The thing about theater is you can bring the fabulousness. Even if you don't get a good part.”

The transformative potential of theatre lies in a complicated mesh of communal experience, intimate identification with character and story, humor, authenticity and surprise — all of which Sloppy Bonnie delivers.

Now that plays begin to leap again from the screen to the stage, this alchemy can begin anew, hopefully with new lessons on inclusion, accessibility and storytelling in tow.

Coming off a year of streaming and pre-recorded theatre, both artists are excited to get a play on its feet and in front of a real, live audience.

“There's something about everybody being in a room together to simply imagine things,” Lowe says. “I think it stretches our humanity in a way that it just makes us more capacious human beings. And that may not last a whole lot longer than the performance, but at least we had it during the performance.”