Life has a very heady feeling for actor-director Scott Elliott these days. Last season he was a struggling artistic director trying to keep alive The New Group, a small Off-Off-Broadway theatre company he founded in 1991.
This season he's been spending a good part of every day talking to two playwrights, theatrical icon Arthur Miller and talented "wunderkind" Jon Robin (Robbie) Baitz. Elliott's been working with each of them on revisions of plays being produced this summer at Williamstown Theatre Festival with Elliott directing.
What occurred to bring about such drastic change in Elliott's life?
He says he doesn't have any idea why all this is happening now. "All of a sudden I have an incredibly busy life," he says with a smile.
However, a look at the record shows that the 34-year-old Elliott is probably the most talked-about young director in New York. Critical and audience reaction to his three most recent shows has made producers and agents sit up and take notice.
Last fall Elliott directed The New Group in Mike Leigh's "Ecstasy." It was a sleeper, a surprise hit that ran for six months at the Judith Anderson Theatre and won a 1995 Obie. It also caught the eye of top theatrical agent Sam Cohen of the prestigious ICM agency who called and immediately signed Elliott up.
Elliott popped up next, in November, at Playwrights Horizons directing Christopher Kyle's "The Monogamist." The show wasn't universally loved by the critics, but it earned Elliott rave notices for his direction.
This May, he scored again with a second Obie, for The New Group's production of Stephen Bill's "Curtains," so successful at Off-Off-Broadway's INTAR on West 42nd Street that Elliott has restaged it just down the block at the much larger Off-Broadway John Houseman Theater for a longer run.
Elliott laughs when asked how it feels to be a phenomenon. "Is that what I am? I don't feel like one. But I do enjoy being busy," he says. "I guess this is what I wanted, though. I always knew that I was going to be in theatre."
He enrolled at the Boston Conservatory to study acting and singing, after graduating high school in his native Bellmore, Long Island. But Elliott succumbed to the tempting lure of a musical role at Minneapolis' Guthrie Theatre and left Boston after only two years. The gamble paid off. For the next few years, Elliott managed to support himself performing in small shows and regional theatre roles here and there, until the pull of New York drew him back East and into the chorus of "Les Misrables" on Broadway.
"I was making good money in 'Les Miz' when I began to realize that although I was surviving and able to do what I wanted, I wasn't comfortable in my body as an actor. What I really wanted to be was a director--and I think I knew it all the time," he admits. "But how can you be a director when you're 21? You don't know enough."
Well, if you're Scott Elliott, you keep on taking any kind of theatre work you can get, you work hard, you form your own company, and if you have the skills and the drive, after about five years everything will be just fine.
Most important of all, though, is that Elliott believes totally in the theatre. That's why he's been working almost round the clock--spending days rehearsing Baitz' "The End of the Day" in The New Group's rented loft; nights supervising the 1,001 details of running a theatre company, especially a fledgling one; at odd times squeezing in long conversations with both Baitz and Miller offering what he terms "objective insight" to improve each of their scripts. To say nothing of fielding countless calls offering new, exciting projects for the stage and even for film.
Film Connections
The film connection is not as far-fetched as it might seem. While appearing in "Les Miz," the enterprising Elliott managed to arrange to take courses leading to a degree in filmmaking from New York University, although he thought he would never use the knowledge. "Things that were offered for films always seemed--well--fluffy. I never though of film as art," he said. But now the offers are so good that he almost can't refuse and is already in negotiation to direct a film in California next year--title as yet unannounced.
But first there's Williamstown.
The collaboration with Miller evolved through agent Sam Cohen who called one day and asked Elliott if he'd like to work with the playwright. It would be on a play done in London four years ago, but never seen here. "Would I like to? Are you kidding?" was Elliott's answer. "It was unbelievable," he says. "I've admired Miller my whole lifetime.
"Then I almost couldn't believe it when Robbie Baitz (an old friend) called and asked me if I'd help him rewrite and later direct "The End of the Day" because Williamstown wanted it. It's a 1989 script that was produced at Playwrights Horizons in 1991. But it never worked and Robbie wanted to try it again. I had just directed it for him in a staged reading a month or so ago, so I knew it had potential," Elliott says.
Elliott was further excited because the two plays have parallel themes. Both deal with the problems of greed, avarice, and lack of moral fiber in the contemporary world, and they do it with touches of humor, he says.
"Miller is a very funny man. In this play, 'The Ride Down Mt. Morgan,' the protagonist is a man who has been living a double life and gets caught, with the humor rather low-key and gentle. Robbie's humor, on the other hand, is biting satire, beautifully subtle, yet poignant. 'End of the Day' deals with a disillusioned British expatriate, who comes to this country to find the American exuberance and spirit he's always heard about. Needless to say he's disappointed."
Both scripts are drastically rewritten now and greatly improved, Elliott feels. His current task is to bring them to life on stage, using his own special techniques. An unorthodox director, Elliott finds it difficult to describe his style.
For starters, he doesn't plan rehearsals, nor does he pre-block. He tries to coax actors gently to express themselves, he says.
"I don't push people into what I want. I encourage them to be bold. I love working actors into different kinds of responses. I also talk a lot," he confesses.
Whatever his method, it is obviously working. Elliott has been praised for finding all the nuances in the scripts he directs. "That's because I look for plays that are not about plot, but where the people are creating the story. 'Curtains' is a good example. It deals with euthanasia, but it's not about euthanasia. It's a play about family dynamics.
"In 'The End of the Day' the plot comes out of the disillusion of the Englishman with the avarice and greed in this country," he says. In the surprisingly comic "The Ride Down Mt. Morgan" Elliott feels that the dramatic movement emerges from unbridled excesses and the inability of the main character to deny himself.
With the Baitz play up and running through June 23 on Williamstown's small Other Stage, Elliott is already deep into rehearsals for the Miller play scheduled on the Main Stage from July 17-28.
As if such back-to-back productions weren't enough, Elliott is already committed to directing Chekhov's "The Three Sisters"for New York's Roundabout Theatre in the fall. Apparently there's no rest for the talented and the amb