BWW Q&A: T.J. Elliott on HONOR at Knowledge Workings Theater

Written and directed by T.J. Elliott, HONOR stars Alinca Hamilton (Andrei Serban's Richard III, Julius Caesar at Classic Stage, To All the Black Girls... at Ars Nova), along with John Blaylock (Doctor Frankenstein at West End Theater, The Temple at The Brick, Proof at The Gallery Players), and Ed Altman (Love's Labor's Lost at Theatre Row, Atlantic Pharmaceuticals at The Tank, Jake Shore's Adjust The Procedure).

T.J. Elliott is a longtime veteran of Off-Broadway. As a playwright, his works include Lazy Eye (at Warren Robertson’s Studio Theatre), Keeping Right, Captive Audiences and The Jester’s Wife. He has also co-written several plays with with Joe Queenan including Alms (at TheaterLab), Grudges, Genealogy (Broom Street Theater in Madison, WI) and The Oracle (Theater for the New City). In the early 1980s, T.J. studied with Alan Brody, Terry Schreiber, and Jill Andre. Born in the Bronx, T.J. now lives in Princeton, NJ.

Knowledge Workings Theater was co-founded by T.J. Elliott and his wife Marjorie Phillips Elliott in 2018 to showcase "problem comedies": plays that explore difficult issues such as race, religion, and ideological polarization in a humanistic and entertaining fashion. Past productions include Alms, Grudges, Genealogy, The Oracle -- all co-written by Elliott and Wall Street Journal columnist Joe Queenan, as well as T.J.'s solo works Keeping Right, Within the Context of No-Context, The Jester's Wife and HONOR.

Can you share about your journey from corporate world to theater? What prompted the transition?

After doing regional theater in upstate New York while still working in behavioral health, I returned to New York city — I was born in the Bronx — and worked as an actor, director, and playwright. But in 1985 married and with an infant daughter, the circumstances compelled me to take a much more demanding 'straight job'. Theater was always on my mind, but between steadily more amending jobs and a steadily increasing family (my wife Marjorie and I ended up with 3 children were now all in their 30s), the plays that I wrote ended up after maybe one reading in a desk drawer. Joe Queenan and cancer not in that order and definitely with different receptions prompted the transition. I got a pretty serious diagnosis and Joe whom I had known at that point for many years and was a big fan of his writing told me that I should get back to writing plays. Initially, I still stalled until he proposed that we co-author a work of theater. That led to Alms in 2019 at TheaterLab. Even though the next year Covid got in the way and our subsequent cowritten play, Grudges, had to be produced via Zoom, it was a big success. The corporate world has given me plenty of material; some of those experiences found their way into the next 2 plays that Joe and I wrote together, Genealogy and The Oracle. Unsurprisingly, many of the skills that served me well during that 35 year stretch that ended up with my being a Vice President and Chief learning Officer of the educational testing service transfer very well to theater. Getting stuff done while finding wonderful people with whom to work is the foundation of any successful enterprise. As someone said to me recently, the core of your success comes from WHO you are and WHOM you know. Working in corporations allowed me to further refine who I am and gave me a great appreciation for the pleasures of collaboration.

What was the motivation behind co-founding the Knowledge Workings Theater?

When Joe Queenan and I started out writing Alms and putting on a reading of it in the fall of 2018, we were respectively 67 and 66 years old. Appropriately, most of the opportunities coming from theaters for development and production are geared toward younger playwrights and especially those who may not have the advantages that Joe and I enjoy. In my first turn in the theater world forty-five years ago, David Mamet kindly wrote a letter of encouragement to me. That's one reason why one of his quotes is a constant guide: “If there’s no place to put on your play, you can’t learn to write a play, because you learn from the audience.” Since we are always learning we need those audiences and to get them we put on plays. Undoubtedly, having spent all those years in the corporate world also influenced the choice to establish Knowledge Workings Theater. I was in a position where I couldn't wait for someone else to do something and had to figure out how to mount projects on my own. We also knew that our plays being what we call 'problem comedies' would appeal to a specific audience and having our own theater company went that we could identify and then cultivate such an audience. We've been very lucky in that way.

How do you incorporate your experience in the corporate world into your plays?

A top executive coach from Texas (and potential investor) was watching me direct our current production, HONOR, the other day and complimented that what I was doing looked a lot like coaching of executives and other professionals. Getting back to writing and directing plays requires using your experience to take something imagined and make it real. I think the best of corporate life does that. Then — and I don't mean this as wickedly as it might sound — the worst of corporate life (the hypocrisies, betrayals, bureaucracies, personal dramas, etc.) provides you with a very substantial source of material. If you are paying attention in any job, you will see some things about the human condition that are worth capturing and conveying via theater. In this play, HONOR, we have an opportunity to see three people, all senior executives in a corporation, who approach the situation — the resolution of a bullying complaint — with very different ideas of what the right thing to do might be. While what goes on in the play is not something I ever witnessed, the conflict of these different worldviews certainly comes from things I saw and heard. One of the most gratifying things about this particular play is that when we had 3 performances this past February as part of The Chain Winter One Act Festival (thank you Christine Perry and KIRK GOSTKOWSKI), audience members would seek me out to say that they knew not only the situation but the 3 people in the play. I think what they meant by the latter part was that these character types are likely to exist in many companies, but they're not always put together in the same conference room for what can be a funny but pointed experience.

Can you share about your collaboration with Joe Queenan? How does this partnership influence your work?

I first met Joe because we played in various league and pickup basketball games together in Tarrytown, New York. That fact is much more relevant than a casual observer might suppose. By the time Joe suggested and then urged me to get back to writing plays we already knew a lot about each other and because were often on the same team how to complement each other's abilities. Co-playwrighting requires more 'Give and Go' than 'ball-hogging'. I think Joe is one of the finest satirists of our generation with his Wall Street Journal column, eleven books, countless articles and BBC programs. His work is not only plentiful and insightful but also consistently hilarious. He is a craftsman and I take very seriously the idea that the word 'playwright' suggests the construction of a worthy vessel in the same manner as a cartwright or boatwright. Joe knows how to build to a point and to a laugh. He has an unerring ear for what would be hackneyed or just plain bad dialogue. And he is very tough about making every word count. So his partnership across those four plays created an influence that can be seen in the other plays that I've written like Keeping Right, The Jester's Wife, and now, HONOR

Can you tell us more about "problem comedies"? Why did you decide to focus on this genre?

There are screwball comedies, romantic comedies and even anti-comedy, but those were not the areas in which Joe Queenan and I had an interest: some of our heroes are George Bernard Shaw and Tom Stoppard. Choosing the subjects of our plays was a natural extension of the kinds of things that we liked to discuss: political divisions, religious arguments, racial discomfort, and corporate shenanigans. HONOR with its raucous and rollicking meeting turning into a free-for-all tests the outer limits of propriety and procedure and is a prime example of what we mean by problem comedy. That's in part due to our commitment NOT to make any one character the hero or any one point of view the anointed correct opinion. We decided to focus on this genre because we believe in the old 'write what you know'. These themes seemed worthy of an audience's attention and as Shaw once wrote, "If you want to tell people the truth, you better make them laugh or they'll kill you" is a great motivator. But for people to really find out what a problem comedy is, they should come down to the Gene Frankel Theatre for one of our shows from September 19 until October 6. All will become clear.

What inspired you to write HONOR?

Honor is one of those words that we hear all the time delivered to us with only the vaguest definition of what the speaker means by that phrase. So, it was fun to think of what honor would mean in the context of a corporation with departments like Legal and HR. The reaction when the play was in the Chain Festival proved out this point as we could hear people arguing as they left the theater with their friends or family as to which of the 3 characters they felt embodied the so-called 'true' meaning of honor. Each character brings their own concept of "honor" to the table for debate, only to be left wondering what constitutes honor in our present world. If we can inspire the kind of wondering in our audiences during this run at the Gene Frankel Theatre starting September 19, then we would be very happy indeed Part of my interest as well is that in my experience corporations either ignore racial discomfort or paper it over with platitudes and consciousness-raising sessions. So I like to get white and black people in the room in my plays and see what happens when the situation requires them to explain what they think and feel about some particular subject. The actors in this production have brought those conversations to life in a way I never dreamed was possible. I am riveted by the back-and-forth that erupts every time they do this this timely and wry look at corporate culture and the extent of one’s personal responsibility. We are eagerly awaiting what will happen when people come to this longer run at the Gene Frankel Theatre. Will they respond in the way we imagine? We are going to find out.

What are your future plans for Knowledge Workings Theater? Do you plan to explore other genres or themes?

We have produced eight plays since 2019; one of them — Within the Context of No Context — was an adaptation of a famous 1980 long essay in the New Yorker by the late George W.S. Trow. We've also filmed scenes from our first play, Alms, in the hope of inspiring other companies around the country and even the world to put on the play. I don't know that we will go that much farther afield from the themes we already address (political divisions, religious arguments, racial discomfort, and corporate shenanigans) because they're very rich and certainly not tapped out. But we do have a play in development now, Retrospective, about an artist confronting the ways in which his life and work are represented by others that Gifford Elliott is going to directors reading before the years through. Given the vagaries of finances and the chronic uncertainty of theatrical enterprises, we tend to take our productions one at a time. We don't have a large administrative staff, but we are blessed with team members like Ed Altman who not only has acted in our shows but also worked as an associate producer. And, of course, Marjorie Phillips Elliott, our Executive Producer keeps strategizing as to what might be next and how we can get there. First, she wants know how many tickets were going to sell to the shows at the Gene Frankel Theatre before we get to plan what's next.

Why must audiences come and see the show?

I think there are 3 reasons why audiences should come and see the show: 1) it had a hit run as part of the 2024 Chain Theater Winter One-Act Festival, HONOR. So, this timely and wry look at corporate culture and the extent of one’s personal responsibility already a proven success in providing laughs and provoking discussion 2) the storytelling by these actors is compelling, highly comedic, and orderly captivating. Audiences will be very glad to discover our stars Alinca Hamilton John Blaylock, and Ed Altman. 3) Our motto once Covid 19 hit was 'Make Theater Live'. There's nothing like that dynamic experience of sitting in front of fine actors inventing a reality that forces you to think, feel, and very importantly laugh. And we managed to do this in a play that has a running time of just over 60 minutes and only costs $25. so, audiences should come and see this show because how often do you get a chance to sit in front of the unfolding of a story at once recognizable, relevant, and rollicking. Oh, there's another reason: supporting off-Broadway keeps the ideas and inventions and art popping up, which is part of what makes New York a very cool place to live. We wouldn't want to be in a town that lost its wonderful theatrical world because people stopped going to shows like this one.

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