Jeff Ornstein 0:01

Hi everyone, and welcome to Next Act with Jeff Orenstein. I am Jeff, and on this show we celebrate people on the cusp of greatness. Those building on past successes in some of the curious and inventive and sometimes unexpected ways they have achieved those, and stepping into moments that could define their legacy. We'll talk about current projects, lessons learned, and the extraordinary opportunities ahead. So the best is yet to come. Tim Elliott is a versatile actor, producer, and educator whose work spans HBO credits, theater innovation, and teaching Shakespeare in a way that connects with modern audiences. From managing the Krimov Lab in New York City to creating viral short-term content on Shakespeare, Tim brings stories and performances to life with deep insight and creativity. And by having read through your CV, I don't doubt it for one second. Very impressive, both in terms of your academic training as well as the things that you've embarked upon, particularly with the Krimov lab. So let's talk about this a little bit, but I'd like to get back a little bit to your beginnings. You transitioned from athletics to theater in middle school. Those are both highly individually focused participatory endeavors. The person has to be really self-trained and such. They're different in many ways. One's very physical, one's very cerebral, but they're also very similar. Is that something that you would characterize yourself as being a super focused?

Tim Eliot 1:31

Yeah, I would. I I always say, like, I grew up as a nerd and then an athlete and then an artist. And I find that there's a lot of similarities between them, and focus is a big part of that. Certainly, you have to have a baseline of skill or you have to build skills. Like I was I'm a soccer player, I was a soccer player. And you need to know how to kick the ball in various different ways. And you need to know how to run for your teammates. So there's a lot of skills that you can build, but your skill level or your capacity is due to your awareness. How aware are you of where everybody else is on the field? How aware are you of your scene partner? How aware are you of the circumstances of the piece? I think people understand that, but we can always go further.

Jeff Ornstein 2:16

You obviously have a deep passion and love for Shakespeare, who was perhaps the greatest storyteller of all time. So let's talk about a little bit about the Krimov Lab and what you accomplished. The Krimov Lab in New York City challenges traditional theater uh structures. So let's elaborate on that a little bit and what surprised you most about working in that experimental uh environment.

Tim Eliot 2:39

Yeah, uh well, I saw Krimov's work for the first time about 15 years ago when I was in Russia. I was studying there as a grad student, and everybody was very excited to take us to this show. It's called Opus No. 7, which also came to not BAM, but the uh St. Ann's Warehouse toured the world and came to St. Anne's Warehouse in New York City many years ago. And I really was totally blown away. Uh the sort of melding of story elements, including hyper-visual, you know, 15-foot-tall puppets and you know, metal pianos on casters in like a demolition derby, um, people on flying rigs, you know, there was such cohesion to all of the elements of theatricality that built to this sort of larger than the sum of its parts experience. And it made me, it really sort of was like, this is what theater can do. This is one of the sort of extreme ends of what the art form is capable of. And I saw a little bit more of Krimov's work while I was in still in Russia, and I never expected I'd be able to work with him. And then the opportunity arose because his translator, his interpreter, Tatiana Haiken, had been helping him discuss the possibility of creating a lab here, like his lab in Moscow. And I ended up in a workshop. I got invited to a workshop through another friend, and she was there, and I knew her from my time in grad school, and he was there. And at the end of the week, they asked if I would help them produce. And so we are definitely challenging what New York understands theater to be. There's a there's a design forward element to our productions. Dima was a production designer before he was ever a director. He was a production designer and then a painter, and then sort of fell sideways into teaching and directing. And so he approaches everything from a visual standpoint, sort of first, although he understands a lot of the he adapts a lot. We're working on Uncle Vanya right now, which is a play he and Russians know very deeply. He grew up in the theater, so it's a piece he's known his entire life. But what he's doing, I found a new way to describe it, is he's telling his own story, as it were, using the elements, the relationships, the characters, some of the plot elements of Uncle Vanya in sort of this it's almost like they're the paint on a palette, and he's painting an entirely new painting, but he's using the same colors, he's using the same image structure uh to tell a very sort of personal story, almost an essay, as it were, about the themes of Uncle Vanya and also other things that are in the air today. What does it mean to be frustrated in your life? What does it mean to lose hope? What does it mean to feel like you're in a crisis and to be atomized, to be for everybody to be in crisis, but but also to be separated, alienated from each other for various reasons, which I think Dima's experiencing, a lot of us are experiencing. And so we're building this piece that is related to Uncle Vanya. And certainly, you know, Yelena is there, and Vanya is there, and Sonia is there. Um, but there's also a chicken. In fact, there's two chickens. And there's a little chick running around stage. So, but it's also inherently theatrical. Dima's a clown, you know, that's his first instinct as a performer. So there's a lot of very funny elements, but also a very a lot of very heartfelt pathos and questioning and mystery as well.

Jeff Ornstein 6:17

Well, I mean, I think that that goes to the fact that the story, whether it's hundreds of years old, is still relevant. The basic components, the paints, as you say, that are spread across the canvas are still relevant today. And people relate to stress or challenge or love or disappointment, and it can be to be interpreted by a contemporary artist. First of all, it's an incredible tribute to the original writer, but it's also, I think, what theater goers are kind of probably looking for. I want to ask you a little bit about the New York audiences, because New York's a theater town. And is it is it your position that New York it's it's a little bit harder to break through with these more classical themes in an interpretive manner?

Tim Eliot 6:57

I don't think so. I think because New York is a theater town, there are audiences eager for everything. They're hungry for everything. They want to see Henry VIII's six wives on Broadway in like a pop, right, you know, musical, which my wife and I have seen and we loved. And they're ready for, you know, bug, you know, Tracy Lett's a remount or a production that they've been doing for 20 years on and off in Chicago. They're ready for strange experimental checkoff or Shakespeare downtown in, you know, an abandoned space or a warehouse or somebody's apartment. I think there's a wide variety of art as and certainly of theater in New York, and audiences are very hungry for whatever's exciting. Every time you buy a ticket to a show, it's like you're playing the lottery. Is this one gonna be the one this month or this year that really just knocks my socks off for whatever reason? Could be that you just love King Lear. You see every King Lear, and every time you go, it really shakes you to your core. Or, you know, you you just respond to certain actors or certain designers, certain spaces. You know, we're working in the Alan Stewart Theater at La Mama, which is really an honor. I mean, being able to work in that space, knowing the history of that space, it's it's kind of incredible to think, oh, here I am on stage at the Alan Stewart. And that goes for a lot of spaces. So I think there are a lot of things that excite a lot of people about you know, art and theater, but finding and communicating to the audience that is going to be excited and getting them in the room is always a challenge because there's so much.

Jeff Ornstein 8:37

Well, clearly the beginnings of your association with Kirmloff were right place, right time, knew someone who knew someone, but you've taken this really far with great success. So we've spoken about the audiences. I'm curious, as a young actor, how do you find young actors or actors in general embracing telling a Shakespearean tale?

Tim Eliot 8:59

Yeah, I think I think there are some barriers, obviously. I think that the language is obviously difficult. It's it's arcane. It's 400, 500 years old, right? We're we're dealing with a different syntax of language, we're dealing with a different sort of base of vocabulary in a lot of ways, and we're also dealing with a difference of context, right? Both the context that Shakespeare was writing about, because he was mostly writing period pieces, as well as the audience he was writing for that had different expectations and different understandings of form. However, there's many more similarities than differences, but I think a lot of people are introduced to Shakespeare reading it in high school or middle school, and it was never really meant to be read. A lot of people talked about this. It was meant to be heard and seen. The only people reading it would have been the actors. And even then they would really only have been reading their own parts as they rehearsed and as they memorized and performed. So I think that there are a fair number of technical barriers in that way. Um, and sort of our understanding of the stories is limited compared to, you know, obviously Shakespeare's, but but also his company and his. But there's such power in his stories, there's such strength and and cohesion in sort of the plot structures as well as the character, the relationship structures in the world, how clearly he delineates the worlds themselves, even though he's sort of sometimes being a little fabular, of like, oh yeah, Bohemia. Where's Bohemia? Well, somewhere in Europe, right? That I think people are are often drawn to it because they can experience, like with opera or musicals or ballet, there's there's this technical proficiency that added to sort of demands on the actor and the the possibility of living through these experiences, it can really achieve some of the heights of the form that you don't necessarily see when you're go see a play about a family gathering for Thanksgiving and secrets being revealed. It's like, okay, sure, there's some important interpersonal drama there, but Shakespeare is shooting for the moon. It's uh I would say it's a rocket ship to the moon every time. Awesome.

Jeff Ornstein 11:00

So actually, then on that note, considered probably, as I said before earlier, one of the greatest storytellers of all time, and you had great success with Ophelia when it was released here in the United States. I heard tens of thousands of viewers. It's fantastic.

Tim Eliot 11:14

Yeah.

Jeff Ornstein 11:15

And and uh my producer shared with me that this came out very close to Taylor Swift's release. And he was curious, and I am too, about is there some parallel between these like major cultural moments? Did you find there was? Because she, Taylor Swift, is also probably considered today's greatest storyteller. I mean, she's sure. So what's your take on that?

Tim Eliot 11:38

Yeah, I mean, I think I think Taylor is has had obviously a a stellar career and is speaking to an audience that is that is desperate to hear stories, the kinds of stories that she's telling. And, you know, I I started creating this channel, this video series on Shakespeare. Um, basically video essays. They're they're mostly dramaturgical. They're pretty nerdy. They're kind of they're pretty inside baseball. Um, I've just been working with the material for so long, and my wife downloaded TikTok and my brother was sharing videos with me. And I was like, oh, I guess I gotta get TikTok. And my wife sort of justified it among all the funny videos and all the dog videos of, you know, there's a lot of content creators, a lot of teachers on TikTok, and they're showing people things. And I was like, oh, that's interesting because I'm an artist, I'm a teacher, you know, I've had this project trying to, you know, sort of change Shakespeare practice for a long time. I was like, oh, this is a format that I could do this. And I started playing around and creating some videos and then started sort of dialing in my the way I was creating them. And I made about 10 or 12 and then just started releasing them in like September or so over the course of a couple weeks. And the last one I released was this, and they were all doing pretty well, you know, 10 to 20,000 views, a lot of likes, a lot of comments, a lot of, you know, discussion. It was great, you know, like great to connect with the people on TikTok and some on Instagram and some on YouTube that that were interested in this material. Cool. And the last one I released is an eight and a half minute long video about Ophelia's role in Hamlet, like her journey, like where does she come from and what happens and like how is she woven into the plot? Like her role is often sort of understood as like she's Hamlet's girlfriend, and then she gets sort of wrapped up in it and things go badly for her. But I'm very diagnostic. I want to know, you know, what I what exactly, how does she integrate? Like, what is she thinking sort of moment to moment throughout the two to three months that the play is going on? And when I've when I've done that analysis before, I found like, oh, there's so much more here than I've ever heard anybody say. So I released this eight and a half minute video on Ophelia. This is very nervous. And then, yeah, a couple weeks later, Taylor Swift happened to, I had no idea because I'm not, I don't follow Taylor Swift really at all. She releases this music video, The Fate of Ophelia. And overnight, you know, this this video that had done very well, I was like, oh, I'm really pleased that, you know, 20,000 people have viewed my my eight and a half minute long, really dirty deep dive on Ophelia. And then suddenly, overnight, my views were just off the charts. I was like, what is going on? What is happening here? I looked at like the graphs of it. So today, and people still watch it every day, there are now about a quarter million views on it. Congratulations. Which is crazy. And you know, not everybody's watching it all the way through, of course. But it's getting fed into the algorithm just because people are Swifties or whatever. And and let me tell you, the Swifties and the anti-Swifties really had it out in my comments, of course, about whether or not she was understanding, you know, like, does does Taylor get this, or yes, she does, and it's a metaphor, and it, you know, but it's great the way that artists working in totally different mediums. Like, I'm not a pop musician. And Taylor, I don't think, is really a a Shakespeare buff, but of course, she connected with some of the ideas of Ophelia and some of the things that Ophelia had gone through, and that's why she wrote the song. And, you know, that that through that character, through that sort of symbol of that idea of a person, you know, artists can connect with audiences who are hungry to understand this pivotal character who is often sort of overshadowed and carries great meaning and was, in a lot of ways, I think, a great hero in that story.

Jeff Ornstein 15:30

So the drama, dramaturgical research is really quite intense. I mean, I had to Google what were all the components, and it's period, it's the politics, it's the socioeconomic, you know, conditions, it's a lot going on there. I mean, yeah, how do you approach that? I mean, that seems like a daunting task.

Tim Eliot 15:51

Yeah, it's a great question. I think there are many different approaches to dramaturgy. A lot of are very literary, of like, oh, we're doing a play based on Kafka. Like, who was Kafka? What did he where was he writing? What was what was he thinking about? Like, who are the people that influenced him? And I find that dramaturgy is most exciting when you're really trying to get the actors dialed in. And because I started in the theater as an actor, and circumstance, the situation, what is the situation? Why is it compelling? Why would you be compelled in this situation to do these things? And I found working on Shakespeare for you know 20, 25 years since I first started picking it up, that there was something that I didn't understand, of course. And the more I sort of scratched at what was it that I wasn't understanding? Why is this person doing this? This doesn't seem to make sense. These plays have lasted 400 years. There's such power in them, there's such clarity in the language when you really start to understand it. Why does Capulet change his mind? At the beginning of the play, he goes, he says to Paris, No, you're not going to marry my daughter. She's not going to marry anybody for two years. Yeah, you can come to the party. And then 36 hours later, he threatens to disown Juliet for not marrying him. So where does that happen? Why does that happen? And investigating circumstances, obviously, you know, what is the location? Where are we? Oh, we're in Verona. We're in Shakespeare's Imagined Verona. When is it? Well, the original story was set here. And when you start to build out those sort of foundational structures, the structure of the world that the writer imagined begins to become clearer. And it's sort of the foundational, and then the structures of the relationships between people in that world and individuals, their relationship to the world and other people in their world starts to become clearer. And that I think really lays the foundation for a plot for events to be very coherent and to connect. I actually was just finishing last night a plot flowchart. I made one many, many years ago, and then I lost the program that allowed me to make it. It was just a flowchart program. And I reconstituted it and posted it on my website last night. It took me a couple weeks to reconstitute it. And really the cohesion of all the events, it's stunning. Like there's there's very little in Shakespeare's plays that isn't somehow connected to the larger flow of things that that happen, and it's incredibly tight. Which, you know, not everything needs to be very plot-driven, of course. So much of our favorite stuff is character-driven or relationship driven. I think Shakespeare has that too, and that's part of why the plays have lasted as long as they have. Plus the language, plus the beautiful people, language, the experience.

Jeff Ornstein 18:40

Well, the environment in that instance is the unseen character. It's vital. It's vital to the actor's, the story, the audience's perception. I'm running out of time, but I have to ask you. Like you could do a new project tomorrow. You know, forget about budget, forget about assembling the talent. Just is there a story that's burning that you haven't in you that you haven't told yet?

Tim Eliot 19:03

Yeah, I'd have to say I'd I'd I'd probably work on Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet or Much Ado About Nothing. They're my favorite place, I would say. I and and, you know, everybody's seen them, but to work on them with, you know, some of my favorite actors, I would love to work on Shakespeare with with Dima, with Dmitry Krimov. We haven't gotten there yet. But I'm also, you know, I'm starting a class on Shakespeare. I'm discussing it with La Mama if they have space and time for me. But I'm going to launch that and I'm going to be emailing people and I'm going to be putting links and making videos about it on my TikTok and my Instagram. So basically sort of starting to announce that I will be teaching a class and I may also do some online like live videos and sessions with people if they're if they're interested in that, if they can't get to New York to take the class. Okay.

Jeff Ornstein 19:50

I have to wrap this up, but did I read you were or are an adjunct professor at theater at NYU? Adjunct professor in the open arts department. In the open arts department. So I just wanted any of our viewers to know, hey, I got to study with this guy. Again, where can I start Googling to find him?

Tim Eliot 20:05

Yeah, uh you can you can contact me on my website. My my last name is spelled with one L and one T, which is rare. So it's Tim Elliott.com. You can you can just find me there. I have a page on coaching. I have a page on the Shakespeare that I just zhuzhed last night. My you can email me. It's just Tim Elliott at gmail. Yeah, I I do lots of private coaching, obviously, and I will be starting a class soon. And I do teach a class at NYU in the open arts department. If you're an undergraduate in the really any department, uh, but especially Tish, you can register for my class. I teach it in the fall and the spring, sometimes in the summer, and sometimes in J turn. It's called Understanding Story, and it's about story structure and what stories are, and it's a writing workshop.

Jeff Ornstein 20:47

Okay. It's very find a lot of inspiration in you. I have certainly, and all the passion you bring to your work. So I really appreciate your taking some time out to speak with me and for me to be able to learn a little bit more about your beginnings and your process and your projects and how you your perceptions of theater and your wishes. So it's been a dream. It's really been wonderful. Thanks, Jeff. It's great to talk to you. And good luck with the product. Yeah, thank you so much. Fingers crossed. Thanks for tuning in to Next Act with Jeff Orenstein. Follow, subscribe, and stay connected to your favorite socials at www.nextdackpodcast.com. Keep chasing your next act. The best is yet to come.