Director Jim Knipple returns to shake up Baltimore theatre scene

In August 2006, after a three year turn as founder and artistic director of Baltimore’s Run of the Mill Theatre Company, 28 year old Jim Knipple headed west into the sunset. (I know that, because I wrote the farewell article.) With his wife, actor Janel Miley, he went to UC Irvine for a three year MFA program, where he polished his credentials as a director.

I ran into him on the last Sunday at the end of a two-week run of Bump!, which he was directing as a one-shot deal at Baltimore’s Theatre Project. The play, written by Johns Hopkins classics major Robert Powers, featured an actress (Deena, played by Rebecca Ellis) in rehab trying to get her face back on the tabloids by faking a pregnancy. The second weekend had been interrupted by Hurricane Irene. Outside the theatre, guerilla marketers were handing out playbills and trying to lure people inside. Upstairs, standing outside the stage door of the Theatre Project, he was glancing at his watch and waiting for a busload of Hopkins students who’d promised to show up.

Hopkins students don’t usually show up in busloads at theatre in Baltimore, but this was an exception. The 22 year old Robert Power is a Hopkins graduate and a winner of a 10 thousand dollar Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, which basically lets promising young Hopkins undergrads spend a year doing whatever they want – as long as they create something.

Power had basically taken freedom-to-do-what-you-want to the max with Bump!, a three act play which, among other things, features a baby in a microwave oven. With the power turned on. Sparkling dialogue was definitely the script’s strong point, and Powers modestly refused to claim all the credit for that: as he told me, he and Knipple had spent some time in rehearsal developing it with actors.

“Prepare yourself,” Knipple told me before I walked into the theatre. I looked at the sign at the Theatre Project’s ticket desk. Mature audiences only. And he was right. This is a bad play for two year olds. And he wasn’t talking about the scene where the audience gets mooned as a character gets injected with steroids. It was probably the scene that caused three people (maybe two, but a sizeable chunk of that particular audience either way) to leave. If I had been an infant – an infant who could walk – I would have left myself.  I exited, a little floored. The last play in Baltimore in which I’d seen audiences actually head for the door between intermissions was Will Eno’s Thom Pain, at Rep Stage. And that was actually in the script.

After about two hours, the rest of the audience trickled out, and cast members bid their final fairwells to one another. I remarked on the early Exodus. Jim laughed. “Honestly, we’d expected more to leave.” And Powers, an intense and promising playwright, seemed to agree. “Because when people leave, at least that means they feel something.”

For Jim Knipple, carrying something away from the theater is essential. Eight years ago, when he arrived in Baltimore after graduating from the theater department at Messiah College in Pennsylvania, he arrived in a town with a two-tier theatre establishment: in Baltimore, either you were in a community theatre (Fells Point Corner Theatre, Vagabond, and Spotlighters) or you were in the one professional ensemble in the City – the Everyman Theatre. “We were really the only ones at that time,” he told me later over the phone.

Attracted by the availability of space and the (relatively) low rents, he founded Run of the Mill Theatre. In a three year span, it changed venues a few times, finally locating itself in St. Mark’s Church. Advertised as “anything but” run-of-the-mill, it injected a new level of theatre: younger, career-oriented ensembles, on low budgets, dedicated to bringing edgier theatre to the city.

Knipple headed out west for his MFA, while Run of the Mill soldiered on. Pioneers don’t always last.  Within a few years, a number of ensembles were trying to do the same thing. Single Carrot Theatre, a highly organized ensemble from University of Colorado’s Department of Theatre, moved into the city in 2006 and set up shop. As Knipple himself admits, they added an element to the mix that Run of the Mill lacked: organizational skills. Producing from the small but highly flexible space in the North Avenue Arts District, Single Carrot raised the bar. Sellout crowds (in their 50-odd seat theater), good PR, and a tight-knit ensemble left Run of the Mill in the shadows. By the time Knipple returned to Baltimore, for a brief (and wild) run of Capek’s RUR, Run of the Mill had run its course. “They were super-organized. We weren’t able to step up to that.”

Now Knipple’s ready to add another new company to the mix. Three years at UC Irvine, and turning 33, hasn’t mellowed him. He’s brought a small ensemble from Pennsylvania (all graduate theater majors, “with a common aesthetic”). It’s still a work in progress, but he’s hoping it’ll add a new element to the Baltimore scene: a tightly knit, trained, ensemble, which takes theatre to the cutting edge.

In his opinion, Baltimore’s newer, hipper theatres are ready for the next stage: training and physical discipline that will get attention outside of the (Baltimore) Beltway and out of that floating world between “professional” and “amateur”.  Knipple says that he’s focusing on developing the ensemble before actually coming up with a script. Before dealing with text, he says, the group is dedicating several months to “constant training.” “We’re focusing on movement and voice, getting to know one another.”

When it happens, he says, people should prepare themselves for a surprise. “I’m all about wild stuff,” he says. In fact, he says, he wants to challenge most of the assumptions that we get when we walk into a theatre. And he embraces short attention spans. Instead of asking audience members to sit tight and turn off cell phones, he’s asking them to flash away. “Theatre is about an experience that people can take away. We’re giving them an experience.” If his direction of  Bump! is any indication, Baltimore should brace itself for something new.

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