Closer look at dad

Through her play, “Tied Up in Knotts,” Karen Knotts wants to reveal not only the real man behind the comedic actor Don Knotts, but also the enormous bond she shared with her father.

The family lived in Glendale from the time Karen Knotts was in kindergarten until she was in the fourth grade at Mark Keppel Elementary School. They lived near Brand Park and she and her brother, Tom, would have picnics there on the weekends, she said.

She now lives on the North Hollywood and Burbank border and works as a part-time reference librarian at Glendale Community College.

Her father, Don Knotts, died from lung cancer on Feb. 24, 2006. He was still performing in plays around the country and Karen Knotts often appeared in them too, she said.

“Creating the play was a reexamination of my relationship with my dad,” she said. “We were always very close. Sometimes over the years we’d grow apart, but mostly we were close.”

Jo Shannon, the show’s producer, believes Don Knotts’ fans will see the human side of him in the play, she said.

“He didn’t let the Hollywood thing go to his head,” she said. “He was unassuming and a down-to-earth human being. Very approachable.”

Don Knotts had a difficult life growing up, and Karen Knotts said she did too. The play delves into how those problems affected their relationship, she said. As the daughter of a famous actor, it was almost like having a role to play and she wasn’t quite sure how to play it, she said.

“He didn’t have a great awareness of that,” she said. “He never really realized the enormity of his fame. And he didn’t realize how it was for us kids, growing up in the shadow of the fame.”

While it was definitely fun to have a famous father, it was also traumatic, she said, adding that at times she felt invisible.

The play is biographical and mixes a little drama with comedy, she said.

“I just took a lot of incidents of my life and balanced them with incidents in his life and I wanted to create a relationship between us, which is really the arc of my show,” she said. “My goal, what I’ve tried to do, is recreate my father as a person rather than his characters. The best part of my dad was his personalty.”

Sioux Schultz, of Burbank, is a fan of Don Knotts’ and recently saw Karen Knotts’ performance.

“It was thoroughly entertaining,” Schultz said. “You never thought of anything else but what was happening on stage.”

When Karen Knotts meets her father’s fans they always ask about trivia — cliché things, like were he and Andy Griffith really friends, she said.

“I always just wanted to talk about him, but they never let me,” she said. “This is my way of talking about him. I’m on the stage, in control, so I get to talk about what I want to talk about.”

She sprinkles the show with ventriloquism, impersonations of Carol Channing and Eileen Dahl, slides of her father growing up and videos of his performances.

One special clip gets raves from the audience. It’s from his TV variety show, “The Don Knotts Show,” which ran in the early 1970s.

In one segment, he sings, “Where Are You Going Little Girl” to Karen Knotts when she was just 16.

“It really pulls at the heart strings,” said Diana London, of Anaheim Hills.

London has seen the play three times.

“It shows the bond that they had,” she said. “It’s a real charming show.”

FYI

WHAT: “Tied Up in Knotts” a one-woman show by Karen Knotts, directed by Art Shulman

WHEN: 2 p.m. Saturday

WHERE: Lonny Chapman Group Repertory Theatre, 10900 Burbank Blvd., North Hollywood

COST: $20; $17 for seniors and students

CONTACT: (818) 700-4878