E2E: blood(line)

Producing Company

Flying Solo! Presents

For 25 years, until mid-2017, Dennis Elkins focused on teaching theater in higher academia in the US Southeast and Rocky Mountain areas. Currently, he lives as an itinerant artist. Recently, Elkins has been creating three original solo shows celebrating the escapades of “mr. dennis” in A trilogy: box., bag— and blood.  The trilogy is a composite of three independent plays tracking the unpredictability of cardboard boxes, the chaotic travels of a middle-aged man on the loose in India and the inevitable chaos of retirement (when set to music). Dennis has also developed and performed other one-man shows of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Poe’s Never Bet the Devil Your Head, and Tipping the Glass, an Evening with O. Henry. Favorite roles include Lear, Shylock, Polonius, Sir Toby, Rothko, Picasso, Joe Keller, and Edna Turnblad. Favorite venues include the Nashville Rep, the Clarence Brown Company, the Colorado and Utah Shakespeare Festivals, Single Carrot Theatre in Baltimore and Thingamajig Theatre Company, Pagosa Springs, Colorado. Directing credits include Merry Wives of Windsor and Comedy of Errors for the New Mexico Shakespeare Festival, The Pirates of Penzance, Spring Awakening, Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Learned Ladies and Little Women. Elkins is a certified associate teacher of Fitzmaurice Voicework® and a member of Actors’ Equity Association.

Karla Knudsen is director/co-collaborator of Dennis Elkins’ A Trilogy, which includes blood(line), and also the solo acoustic musical, A Sea Full of Stars. She has directed/performed with Savannah Shakes, Savannah Rep, and Collective Face Theatre and taught at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). Karla serves as consulting editor for ARTPULSE. Summers, she can be found hiking glaciers and building tiny houses with her family. Karla holds degrees from SCAD and Carnegie Mellon University.

Brandon Scott Grayson is a composer, lyricist, music director, and arranger originally from Las Vegas, NV. Highlights include multiple seasons and over a dozen productions with the Utah Shakespeare Festival, several productions with CAP21 at Molloy University, as well as music directing various world and US premiere musicals, including The Sandman (written by the authors of the Tony award-winning musical Bandstand). He is also a published composer, writing music for the shows Best Foot Forward! (Youthplays) and Clown Bar 2 (Concord).

Penny Cole (Producer/Artistic Director) is a lifelong theatre maker and educator. An award-winning director, her work spans from the ancient Greeks, through Shakespeare, to new work. In the last 15 years her focus has been working with playwrights on the development of new plays through staged readings, workshops, and fully staged productions. She has worked with, among others, the Athena Project Arts in Denver, Colorado, chaired the Mid America Theatre Conference Playwrights Symposium, directed for Curious New Voices, Curious Theatre Denver, as well as directed a reading for a National New Play Network festival. In 2018, she founded Flying Solo! Presents with the expressed purpose of fostering new work by American artists on the international stage. Since the premiere season in Edinburgh in 2019, Flying Solo! Presents has supported more than 30 artists in 25 productions, including online shows during the pandemic. Productions include 4 concerts by American-based musicians, a dance production, multiple solo shows, new musicals, as well as 4 new works in collaboration with This is Not a Theatre Company. At the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2022, Flying Solo! Presents produced a showcase of new American work and emerging American artists featuring 13 artists. Follies, A Showcase of Bits and Bobs will be back in Edinburgh in 2023 highlighting the work of a brand-new group of artists.