Amanda Knox is bringing her one-woman show to Tacoma. Here’s what to expect
There’s a thin line between comedy and tragedy.
In her upcoming one-woman show, Amanda Knox will attempt to walk that tightrope.
It’s a story many know already: The 20-year-old American living in Italy was convicted of murdering her roommate, Meredith Kercher, in 2007.
The trial became an international media circus that painted Knox as a killer, though she consistently maintained her innocence.
After four years of incarceration and eight years of legal battles, she was acquitted in 2015.
Since her freedom in 2011, Knox has shared her experience through various mediums and media outlets. Lately, she’s been trying a new form of storytelling — comedy.
After honing her stand-up skills over the last six years, she’s compiled a one-woman show that she’s taking to the world-renowned Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland in August.
Ahead of her performance across the pond, she’ll perform the one-woman show in Washington, at the Tacoma Little Theatre on July 28.
Knox welcomed The News Tribune to her Vashon Island home this week with a grin, shuffling to her front door in neon tie-dye Crocs garnished with silicone anime Giblets.
Her playful energy extended to her living space, her walls dotted in a vibrant collection of artwork, a sprawling bookcase brimming with novels, a dining room table covered in magazine cut-outs.
The expansive view of the teal Salish Sea through her living room windows cast a feeling of freedom into her home, a far cry from the prisons in Italy where she spent four years of her life.
In the time since her release, the island became an artistic oasis for Knox.
It’s also where the Seattle native started a family with her husband and fellow writer Chris Robinson.
Motherhood already isn’t easy. Combining that with the weight of imprisonment and a tabloid-fueled reputation as a murder suspect results in particularly unique parenting challenges.
Their two children, 5-year-old Eureka and 2-year-old Echo, have slowly learned the tale of “Mommy goes to Italy” in bite-sized pieces.
As she raises her children, especially her daughter, Knox grapples with protecting her from the outside world while teaching her the lessons she wishes she learned in adolescence.
“I’m juggling that tension between wanting to cultivate that blessed life and also wanting to cultivate enough knowledge that maybe [my daughter] will be a little bit less naive than I was,” Knox said.
In the years since Italy, Knox has adapted her life’s story into two memoirs, a podcast, a Hulu mini-series and documentary.
“I’m in this very creative and productive period of my life, which is both very exciting and gratifying,” Knox said. “Also it’s just a lot of work.”
Onstage comedy wasn’t something she thought would fit her niche. For a long time, she considered herself “the tragedy girl,” she said.
After developing friendships with comedians like Whitney Cummings, who affirmed that she was, in fact, funny, Knox felt inspired to embrace that part of herself.
“The outside world had sort of defined me as a certain thing,” she said. “I don’t have to be what you think I am. That’s kind of also the point of the show, to show my daughter that no one else defines you but you.”
She grew her confidence experimenting during gigs on Vashon Island, slowly graduating to larger performances around America.
At first her material focused on facets of modern Mom life, like “having the hots for Bluey’s dad.” Through practice, she gained the confidence to acknowledge the elephant in the room and delve into her controversy.
From those bits of comedy, she eventually got the idea for a show that takes the experience deeper.
Though the performance will showcase Knox’s comedic chops, it will also be a time to directly engage and reflect with the audience on the serious aspects of her case.
From that, “Cartwheel” was born.
The performance’s name is a double entendre.
On an obvious note, it alludes to the Italian police’s accusation of Knox’s strange behavior while waiting to be questioned, which included doing a cartwheel and splits.
“One, that never even happened. I was doing yoga,” Knox said. “But furthermore, even if I did do a cartwheel, that doesn’t make me a murderer.”
Never mind Knox’s intentions, accusations of her unusual behavior during the investigation spiraled into unflinching proof of guilt in the public eye and went on to define the rest of her life.
Even now, after more than a decade unconfined and now living on a secluded island more than 5,000 miles away from Perugia, the traumatic feelings still sneak up on her, she said.
When she taught her daughter how to cartwheel, a trick she loved as a child, memories of her incarceration hit like a ton of bricks, she said.
Little things like that inform her comedic candor, she said, and, when processed through stand-up, help her unravel the restrictive narrative that others have imposed onto her life.
The show’s name also nods to a deeper figurative meaning of a cartwheel, Knox said.
“Once you start a cartwheel, the only way to finish a cartwheel is you just have to keep going. Otherwise, you turn upside down. You just have to keep going until you land back on your feet,” Knox said. “It seemed to encapsulate a lot of ideas that I’m working on in the show.”
Though facing her fears often means facing her critics firsthand, Knox isn’t daunted. She’s found the theatrical experience to be cathartic.
“Reestablishing that sense of connection and a mutual understanding is deeply healing,” she said. “Other people are like, ‘That would be so terrifying,’ and it’s like, honestly, there are worse things than being embarrassed. I know what they are.”
