"Old Black Magic," Olio Theatre Works, Long Beach, CA

Once the laughter had died down, however, the idea remained. “I started thinking, Tim’s an incredibly talented actor but up to that point I had only known him to do things he could do kind of easily. I wanted to see what would happen if he got pushed to his professional limit.” She began experimenting with ways to push her talented friend emotionally. “To me, the most emotional place is when you’re backed up against a corner and you have no choice but to change, to break through something.”

She found herself drawn to a familiar figure, one backed into a physical and literal corner for being a gay man when it was not only taboo but illegal. “It was one of those things where divine intervention and instinct come together and I thought: Oscar Wilde.”

Oscar Wilde — famous poet, playwright and personality — was imprisoned for two years after being found guilty of having a relationship with a Lord Alfred “Boise” Douglas. During Wilde’s imprisonment, he lost everything: his reputation, his career, his wealth. Even his wife Constance, with whom he had a loving if not romantic relationship, was persuaded to leave him with their children. Two years after he was released from prison, Wilde passed away.

“I started researching and immediately I was hooked,” says Knudson. “By his story, by the truth of what he had gone through.”

The play is set within the last 24 hours of imprisonment, using flashbacks and transcripts from the trial. “The audience is brought into the cell with [Wilde] while he goes back and looks over the previous three or four years and the trails. Specifically what he is working out in this story is the dynamic he had with loving his wife, who he was in love with but not romantically, and the love that he found with his male lover. The trying relationship of being pulled between two worlds and not being able to be who he was in either of them.”

Knudson, who plays Constance to Thorn’s Wilde, believes she or Thorn could easily have found themselves in Wilde’s situation had they lived in the same historical era and been forced to make the same hard decisions. “I wrote it as a tribute to what it must be to an openly gay man living in a world where that’s not acceptable. But once I started writing it, I realized there were more stories than just that. There’s also the story of being a wife, married to somebody who was the ultimate of unavailable but loving him, and what social masks she was willing to wear. I was interested in telling a story about human beings in extraordinary circumstances so none of them are the bad guys. I believe most people are just doing the best they can.”

Knudson and her actors also see a modern day parallel to the play in the need for gay rights. In particular, the right for marriage equality and the continued effort to repeal proposition 8. Knudson hopes the issues brought up in the play will lead to community discussion and awareness. “It doesn’t matter where someone stands on the line of equality,” she says. “It’s an important dialogue. I really believe that by having people come and experience this, we can try to find a middle ground so everyone truly has equal rights.”

To demonstrate their social and political commitment to this dialogue, Olio Theatre Works has agreed to contribute to the California Courage Campaign. “We have pledged and are very excited about donating a portion of the ticket profits from the entire run of the show back to the Courage Campaign.” The Campaign not only supports marriage equality but other progressive legislature in the state of California. “For me the show is not just about gay rights but more about human rights and general equality.”

And did she succeed in her quest to challenge her dear and talented friend Tim Thorn? Knudson describes the moment she showed Thorn the play for the first time: “I gave Tim the first four pages, which was literally one monologue four pages long. He was like, (Knudson demonstrates with an awed pause) ‘This is good.’ And then he’s like, (Knudson performs another pause, now with apparent terror) ‘Damn. This is a lot of lines.’”

A challenge his writer, director, co-star and friend believes he will rise to. To Knudson, everything about Olio Theatre Works is “an absolute joy. It’s a real gift to be able to not only do what I love but to do it with my favorite people and some of the most talented people I’ve ever known.”