By Bella Poynton
(Image above: Actors Caitlin Baeumler Coleman (L) and Kristen Tripp Kelley in ‘Gidion’s Knot’; image courtesy of Brazen-Faced Varlets)

Gidion’s Knot by Johnna Adams, directed by Lara D. Haberberger, and now playing at Brazen-Faced Varlets, is a razor-sharp 80-minute one-act that builds a mystery full of brutal realities and difficult truths.

The tension between the two characters, Heather (a fifth-grade teacher) and Corryn (the mother of a student), emerges almost immediately — just as soon as actors Kristen Tripp Kelley and Caitlin Baeumler Coleman appear on stage. The play is a two-hander, which only adds to the intensity of its relentlessness, and both performers give sharp, raw and often unexpected performances.

Coleman’s Heather is jittery and anxious, reeling from a trauma yet unrevealed. Kelley’s Corryn begins the play composed but is gradually unable to maintain the mask. She never plays the expected tropes of grief, which keeps the performance crisp and surprising. Still, we recognize her actions as those of someone grieving — cruelty, hostility and a desperation for some sort of control. Coleman delivers a vulnerable performance that requires courage and precision while Kelley carries the emotional weight of the piece with steadiness and intensity.

There is a gripping push-and-pull between the actors, like two bats circling a lightbulb, desperate for some sort of escape. Kelley’s snide remarks and jabs land like bricks just when we’re tempted to relax into the narrative. Coleman, meanwhile, inhabits a character whose silence is as equally compelling as her words; she tries to come across as the more rational of the two, but winds up appearing pedantic to a fault. Together, they build a dynamic that is both prickly and intimate, where every awkward silence makes your stomach lurch — in the best way.

Mia LaMarco’s classroom setting is stark, white and intentionally a bit too empty. To me, it suggests a kind of emotional sterility affecting both characters in different ways. The overhead lighting mimics the awful halogen glare we’ve all experienced in middle and high school classrooms. Stefanie Warnick’s lighting design is unnerving in its oppressive brightness and its constant, fixed bleakness.

The environment, like the play itself, offers no comfort—the perfect setting for such an intense confrontation.

What makes the piece sing, though, is its commitment to emotional truth. Adams has written something so precise that, at times, its hyper-realism makes you squirm. You know the feeling — waiting for someone to respond when you’re already regretting what you’ve asked. It’s uncomfortable because it’s real.

But even beyond its well-structured awkwardness, the script dares to withhold its secrets for longer than expected. In fact, it’s nearly 40 minutes before we hear Gidi

on’s disturbing short story, so when the shift comes, we are very much ready for it.

The minutes-long story is filled with blood, guts, torture, sexual violence and enough horrific imagery to haunt your dreams for weeks. Even I (someone who loves everything dark and gothic) was taken aback.

Still, the writing is spectacular, and this complicates everything. The play finally flips on itself, and we are in for the downward slope of the roller coaster. There is something remarkable and gutsy about Adams’s ability to create prose so beautiful yet so deeply disturbing at the same time. She courageously halts the play to read the entirety of a short story aloud in the middle of the play, and somehow, the narrative is better for it. Adams writes prose as deftly as she writes dialogue, perhaps even with an edge toward prose. The rest of the piece hinges on the layered complexity of Gidion’s story, and we, as audience members, wind up truly torn about what to think when it’s finished.

The play asks difficult questions about the cost of creative genius, the horror that talent can bring forth and the unsettling truth that sometimes children are not innocent at all. Should we uplift talent like Gidion’s without judging the offensive, violent content of it? Should we celebrate artistic talent when the work produced is dangerous, hateful or unspeakably cruel? The audience is positioned to ask themselves these questions throughout, but the play itself refuses to give a clear answer.

The weight of the questions rests not only in the text, but also in how the piece is staged, paced and shaped by the director. Directing a two-hander like Gidion’s Knot is no easy feat. With only two actors onstage, no scene changes and no outside interruptions for over an hour, there’s nowhere to hide. Haberberger meets this challenge with confidence, guiding the piece with a subtle approach that feels organic. It’s as if she’s deliberately stepped back, resisting the urge to manufacture emotional peaks and valleys. Instead, Haberberger trusts the material and the actors to lead the way. The high points don’t feel like they’re being delivered based on adherence to formalist narrative. They just … happen, and that kind of restraint takes enormous skill.

Gidion’s Knot doesn’t need elaborate sets, lighting tricks or flashy transitions to make its impact. The production’s sparseness is part of what makes it so affecting. The intimacy of the space, combined with the emotional intensity of the material, makes the experience worthwhile. We love to fill our Buffalo theater season with comedies, musicals and crowd-pleasing farces — and believe me, I love them, too! But every now and then, a play like Gidion’s Knot comes along to remind us of what the form is capable of when it turns its gaze toward the darker recesses of human experience.

Gidion’s Knot continues with performances at the Compass Performing Arts Center, 545 Elmwood Ave., on Friday, Nov. 14 (7:30 p.m.); Saturday, Nov. 15 (5 p.m.); Friday, Nov. 21 (7:30 p.m.); and Saturday, Nov. 22 (5 p.m.). Tickets are available HERE.

Dr. Bella Poynton is a playwright, dramaturg, actor and theater historian from Buffalo. She teaches at SUNY Oswego.