Kickback with Tim Koh, theater director

I’ll start off by saying Timothy Koh is impressive. Full stop. For one, he’s the only Shakespeare director I know. He’s also a 25 year old who made the decision to study Shakespeare and theatre (please note my prestige spelling) and English/American literature while working and writing at the same time. Senior year at NYU, to say the least, was a whirlwind for a lot of people. For Tim, that included writing an award-winning honors thesis that I’ll summarize as Paradise Lost is with the Shits: John Milton, the Garden of Eden, and All Manner of Bodily Waste, directing a social media-infused production of Julius Caesar, working for Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony Award winning producer Scott Rudin, and nabbing a prestigious fellowship with Playwrights Horizons before graduation. In the six months since, Tim hasn’t stopped for a break. This is not a “glorifying the grind” piece, though, it’s a “look at this kid” end of year retrospective of sorts.

Tim and I meet at a midtown coffee shop to talk because that’s what young professionals in NYC are supposed to do. It’s the first week of November, during the string of bone-chillingly cold days that make some people forget that the earth is burning. If we were influencers, we would take photos of the sun setting, and edit those photos for Instagram with quippy hashtags and tongue-in-cheek fake locations. Unfortunately, neither of us are on Instagram all that much, and I am late. Tim, in proper theater fashion, is very much on time. Let this be a symbol of our respective careers. Anyways, the trendy coffee spot chosen (which featured Totoro pastries and lavender lattes) is incredibly busy because it’s a trendy midtown coffee spot. Tim suggests we grab food and chat elsewhere. You could say he directs the situation. I oblige.

We end up at a crowded Dig Inn, and speak about Adam Driver, Kenneth Branagh films, Beowulf, and (primarily) theater directing as some outside car is maybe being robbed. The recorded conversation is more than an hour and a half long, with a fifteen minute roast of that one writer who didn’t bring notes to their Rihanna interview. I’ll keep it to the Cliff Notes for the benefit of us all.

We discuss Beowulf first, since Tim describes the epic as his “first love.” That love comes across easily, in part due to the cashier’s decision to play “Do U Wrong” by Leven Kali, a decidedly romantic and airy song, just as Tim goes into the reasons why he feels so strongly about the tale of the eponymous great hero and the monsters he slays.

“With Beowulf,” Tim says, “I just liked the poem. I love it very deeply. [...] I don’t know how I stumbled upon it, but I was probably on the Wikipedia page for English literature and what is this big Old English thing and then I fell into it. Beowulf, I always read the Heaney translation, so that was the one I was born and bred on. And that was the one that the adaptation popped out of, and that’s the language I use for the adaptation.”

The adaptation he’s alluding to is his 2018 production of the Heaney translation for the stage. This production worked as a sort of gateway drug for the Shakespeare productions that would follow, the plays that would make Tim a Shakespeare director. Beowulf seems to have served as a foundational experience that not only frames how Tim examines works to adapt, but the language of theater itself.

“I like the Beowulf story, but I think what was interesting to me, looking back at it, [was] being a non-American guy doing a play with a bunch of Americans of an Old English text that was not even set in England.” Tim, who hails from Singapore and has lived in NYC since starting university in 2015, says, “I liked that cascade and I think it was my first attempt at adapting. It was the poem and we staged it. It was an exercise of ‘okay, if epic poetry was orally passed down and theater is partially an oral art, is there a way to merge the two?’”

Beowulf helps me think a lot about linguistic heritage and linguistic history because you have to read it in translation unless you learn the language and it’s interesting because if you’re from some sort of Anglophone background anywhere in the world. . . I find Beowulf by happenstance, the only Old English poem that we have—and discovered late, like in the 19th Century. Milton didn’t know Beowulf. So it’s a new-ish thing.”

“[Beowulf is] like the oldest English epic poem we have, and it’s not like the Iliad or the Odyssey in the sense that it’s set apart from Western culture because it was not a part of Renaissance culture [...] Beowulf helps me think about Anglophone culture in a not-necessarily Western sense.”

Listening to Tim discuss the nuances of Beowulf and how he understands it, I wonder how the production worked as an impetus for a love of Shakespeare directing. Isn’t Shakespeare, after all, the Western playwright to many? Shakespeare feels like a part of Western DNA sometimes, for better or worse (lest we forget the cringeworthy politics of some of the Bard’s most popular works). Beyond clever SparkNotes tweets and every American high school student’s encounter with Romeo and Juliet, Shakespearean storytelling feels inextricably linked to English-language storytelling. Everything from The Lion King to 10 Things I Hate About You, Romeo + Juliet to Succession are all explicitly Shakespeare-inspired and widely celebrated. I mean, The Lion King—or rather, Hamlet but make it Disney—is a classic. Beyoncé couldn’t even make the masses like the remake more than the 90s original.

What all these notable Shakespeare-inspired works have in common is that they switch things up. They play with place (King Lear is transported to NYC in both Fox’s Empire and HBO’s Succession), time (a feminist-ish spin on The Taming of the Shrew with 10 Things), species (cute baby Simba instead of moody, petulant Hamlet). On the capital “B” Broadway side of things, there was even a June 2019 revival of King Lear produced by the previously mentioned Scott Rudin. None of the successful Shakespeare adaptations have lacked imagination of some sort.

On his own approach to adaptations, Tim thinks of what is new and exciting. Otherwise, “It’s boring, you might as well just read the poem. I think a lot about ‘why now?’ You don’t need another production of Hamlet, you really don’t.”

I trust Tim to describe and put on an interesting Shakespeare production. This is the same person who staged Julius Caesar’s famous Marc Antony speech (“honorable men,” and its glorious irony and parallelism) with a fake Instagram Livestream. Tim also, notably, directed a production of Much Ado About Nothing that infuses the play with pop punk music and visuals. These changes weren’t merely aesthetic.


Pop punk aesthetics in Much Ado About Nothing

“I like pop-punk music a lot. I like the way that pop-punk music talks about love. And Much Ado is a lot about love, so that was what informed this production of Much Ado unique and why there was something to say about its relationship to Avril Lavigne.” Tim says, “Or how Avril Lavigne or Green Day and Mayday Parade and the language of love they employ in their songs speaks to the language of love in Much Ado. And that affects everything about how I staged certain scenes, the conversations I had with my costume designer.”

The costume designer “ended up dressing Beatrice [the play’s female lead] in one of the Avril Lavigne tie/tank top kind of thing. Because Much Ado is about these soldier boys coming back from war and they woo these girls, so we put them in these ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’ soldier jackets.”

Tim continues to talk about his pop punk/Much Ado fusion, saying that “Within the pop-punk world, emo-ish vibe with their soldier thing and there are soldiers in this play—it clicked. This fits so well. That’s something I knew going into Much Ado; I want to approach the text going into this landscape, this idea.”

Soldier jackets and graffitti set in Much Ado

When I ask Tim about uncharted territory, Shakespeare plays he wants to put on, he talks about Antony and Cleopatra. The 17th Century tragedy, while a popular show for British audiences, hasn’t been on a major US stage since Tina Landau’s 2010 Hartford Stage production. The gap in American depictions of Shakespeare’s messier star-crossed lovers makes sense when Tim says the work is “a long messy play, and it gets really difficult. Sometimes in the middle sections you’re like ‘what is going on?’” compared to “tighter” shows like Macbeth and “all the famous [Shakespeare plays].”

Tim sets Antony and Cleopatra as “a goal far into the future as something when I’m good enough and the time comes, I’ll be able to handle.” As challenging as he describes it, Tim says that he thinks “it has some of the most beautiful language in all [Shakespeare’s] plays, and this whole idea of “would you throw away your empire for the person that you love?” What does Tim have to say about Antony and Cleopatra for contemporary audiences, for our critical moment? This is the (compound) question left to answer.

At this point, the English Literature part of Tim’s double major becomes most pronounced. In case you forgot, this director’s the same guy who won the Frederick Seward Gibson Prize (given to best thesis in British or Anglophone Literature) for his writing on excrement in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. While I find this particular theater/lit marrying of arts fascinating when examining his body of work, the combination isn’t odd to Tim. It’s natural.

“What surprised me the most when I came into college was that most people didn’t view theater and literature as two peas in a pod. Growing up in Singapore, it’s more common at home. These two things make sense to me. So it was a bit of a shock when I came to New York, and everyone’s context for theater was musicals.”

“To me, if we went to a ‘normal’ small liberal arts college [as opposed to NYU and all her memes], English/theater’s a common major combo. But I’m the only one in my friend group who does that. That was a big surprise because I do think that they’re very related, and in the first core class I took [...my] TA said ‘writing an essay, you are to find a nuanced, unobvious argument to put forth on the text’ and I thought that was the most succinct way to talk about the basics of writing an essay up to writing a thesis.”

Thinking about Tim’s directing style with the kind of nuance and expectation of theory you’d expect from a thesis would be apt. He puts equal thought and scholarship into both exercises.

“Directing a play is exactly the same thing. At least directing classic texts. Why here? Why now? Or else read the text.”

This kind of urgency is felt in all the plays Tim has directed. It ensures that the work to come will be inherently interesting, critical, and challenging for Shakespeare newcomers and skeptics alike. For example, Tim’s Julius Caesar changed the genders of both the title character and Marc Antony. Gender and race “bending” have been topics of discussion regarding tons of White cultural staples from the Public Theatre’s production of Hercules (which featured Jelani Alladin, a Black man, as Hercules) to the recent Little Women remake, which has gained criticism for being another all-White adaptation of the classic novel. Representation seems to be the new name of the game, at least aesthetically. Whether or not making White characters people of color gains the nuance of simply giving people of color the space to tell their own stories has yet to become a forefronted idea. Tim maintains that there must be a specific type of intentionality behind such changes.

Regarding Shakespeare specifically, “[changing the race/gender of characters] is common and I think if you do it, you absolutely need a framework about how. You can still use he/him pronouns as the character, but are you saying that the character is female or it is a female person playing a male character? And what are the politics of seeing a female body on stage inhabit the world? It has to inhabit the world in a different way than a male body.”

The reason behind his Caesar change is that “the most popular [thing] on Instagram is a femininity that is objectified online--Kylie Jenner, Selena Gomez-- and if the most popular person on Instagram is a woman, the most popular person in Julius Caesar [is Caesar] then Julius Caesar himself needs to be played by a woman.”



An example of Instagram screens in Julius Caesar

“I wouldn’t just flip [gender/race] just because.[...] There needs to be a sustained reason, a good argument with evidence--like a good essay--to do so. I think it’s not impossible, it just elevates the work and then allows the work to shine better than it would without reason. Things should be done with reason.”

This logic, given all Tim has said up to this point, is not surprising. What I find especially fun is that the project Tim is currently working on has very little to do with Shakespeare at all. The play he current assistant directs (we’ll call this AD-ing because it sounds fancy and filmic) is MacArthur Genius Grant winning playwright Samuel D. Hunter’s Greater Clements at Lincoln Center Theater. The plot focuses on “a small, disenfranchised mining town in Idaho, and it is about this old woman who is 65 year-old [whose] family has been in this town called Clements for generations[...] The play begins when an old stranger from her high school days comes to visit.”

We all know what happens when a stranger comes to visit--death or drama. In a way, Greater Clements provides both. It’s a non-Shakespeare play directed and AD’d by Shakespeare people. Tim works under the leadership of Davis McCallum, who is himself the Artistic Director of the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, and directs regularly in New York. According to Tim, McCallum’s also a generous teacher.




The play itself is a thing of beauty. When Tim compares the tone to that of mid-20th century greats like Arthur Miller and Lorraine Hansberry, he’s right. Hunter’s writing explores the complexities of the mundane, takes emotional turns that feel earned and heartbreaking. I like art that brings you up and crashes you down (not sure what that says about me, but we can put a pin in that for now). Greater Clements does just that with standout performances from the lead, Judith Ivey, and Ken Narasaki.

Working on Greater Clements has allowed Tim to “have a hand in things,” and observe the intricacies of a professional relationship between playwright and director (Hunter and McCallum have worked together since the early 2010s), yet another frontier to cross. AD-ing on this show has opened new doors for Tim—he is at some moments a researcher, taking notes for the director and playwright in order to successfully be “a part of the creative conversations that occur,” and at other points a fine-tuner, “given the autonomy to take an actor into another room to sharpen a physical movement” or adjust a technique to make a scene more authentic.

“I feel that the fact that I’m given this responsibility on such a high profile company has made me a better director in general.” Tim says of his experience, “I am made better and better equipped to push myself forward. I am ready.”

Ready for what? The next big Playwrights Horizons productions under his fellowship, maybe. The first of 2020 comes with Michael Friedman and Daniel Goldstein’s forthcoming musical, Unknown Soldier. Musicals have been conspicuously absent from our conversation about theater, so I imagine that’ll be a fun new challenge. After that comes Tell Me if I’m Hurting You in May 2020, a play by Jeremy O. Harris of Broadway's Slave Play fame. May we all take in that big flex and ready ourselves for the many to come. I’m sure Tim’s path to Tonys and Obies and all the theater things will be paved by surprises.

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