Honor, after a hit run as part of The 2024 Chain Theater Winter One-Act Festival, will run at The Gene Frankel Theatre from September 19th – October 6th.

Two corporate lawyers, Ronnee and Ludwig, sit in a conference room awaiting the arrival of Don, another executive at their company. Their purpose is to deliver to Don a recent investigation’s results regarding a complaint lodged against him, but Don has another purpose in mind: Honor, specifically his honor. This demand leads the trio to explore pricelessly what meaning that word carries in our present time. If any. 

A Knowledge Workings Theater Production

Written & Directed by T.J. Elliott

Technical & Artistic Director: Gifford Elliott

Starring

The primary cause of our group is to make theater live, to as Marsha Norman once wrote, “provide a keyhole into some world that nobody has ever seen.” We want to produce what Hilton Als called “…a refraction of reality, containing feelings and thoughts that are put forth, first, in a primary text, which the actor interprets—an interpretation that the director supports or edits, in an attempt to help build, in a made-up world, an atmosphere of verisimilitude.”

And we think people should laugh while we do that heeding the aphorism attributed to George Bernard Shaw that “If you want to tell people the truth, you’d better make them laugh …”

In January 2018, Joe Queenan and T.J. Elliott started writing their attempts at truth telling via ‘problem comedies’. These plays explore difficult issues in a humanistic and entertaining fashion seeking through their collaboration with actors, director, other theater professionals, and the audience to provoke discussion and understanding of issues and ideas critical to our time such as race, religion, and ideological polarization.

In order to reach audiences as directly and immediately as possible, T.J. and Executive Producer Marjorie Phillips Elliott founded and incorporated Knowledge Workings Theater. Our first Off-Broadway Equity showcase, Alms, enjoyed a sold-out run in May 2019 at TheaterLab in NYC. In that production and with all of our subsequent productions, our main aim is to not only stage our ‘problem comedies’ but also give members of our team — actors and our tech wizards — opportunities to show their work to a wider audience.  

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, like other NYC companies we had to stage our next two plays — Grudges and Keeping Right — via Zoom. Nonetheless, we managed to ‘make theater live‘ and successful even on that less-than-ideal venue. In November 2021, we returned to an actual stage through our co-production with Broom Street Theater of Madison Wisconsin of our play, Genealogy.  Most recently, we staged in May 2022 a successful run of our play The Oracle at Theatre for the New City.  Now our team is working on the production OOB of The Jester’s Wife (Autumn 2023)

Knowledge Workings exists and is funded by its founders to present plays, not garner profits. All members of the team must receive adequate compensation for their valuable work. Knowledge Workings is a member of Alliance of Resident Theaters/New York.