COVER STORY

PHOTOS BY CHRIS MORTENSON

Sowing Anarchy

Tim Robbins and The Actors’ Gang celebrate 40 years of risk-taking and challenging authority

By Bridgette Redman

Forty years ago, eight UCLA students got together to put on a show, something different from what they were finding in the theatrical curriculum. The show was such a success that it lasted for six months and launched a theater company that is alive and thriving today. “It was fun,” said Tim Robbins, who was in the original show and is a co-founder and the artistic director of The Actors’ Gang. “It was a little bit dangerous. We were doing it in Hollywood at midnight on a dark street.” Those late-night showings of “Ubu the King” were the foundation of The Actors’ Gang, a Culver City theater company that prides itself on taking risks, on performing shows that are outside the comfort zone of artists and audiences. “The audience really were the ones that made The Actors’ Gang happen because their response was so enthusiastic and so prolonged over a period of six months and gave us the confidence and desire to do more,” Robbins said. This year they will celebrate their 40th anniversary season by revisiting “Ubu the King” for late-night shows that will run in previews from Friday, Oct. 14, to Friday, Oct. 21, and performances from Saturday, Oct. 22, to Saturday, Nov. 5, Friday, Nov. 18, and Saturday, Nov. 19. The bar opens at 9 p.m., followed by the show at 10 p.m. The Actors’ Gang board will also host an anniversary concert at BroadStage on Nov. 12 and two weeks later, the company will open a holiday show. “We were from the start, a group of young men and women that liked punk rock and didn’t necessarily fit in with the standard fare at the theater department, backed by very supportive teachers,” Robbins said. “We were backed by the teachers who explored and taught their students about the different forms other than American realism. At The Actors’ Gang, we’ve gravitated more toward German expressionism, absurdism, dadaism as forms of theater that we wanted to explore.” In the intervening years, they’ve managed to survive as a theater that sticks to its principles, doing without corporate sponsorship and branching out to schools and prisons. Since its start in 1982, ensemble members have included Robbins, Jack Black, John Cusack, John C. Reilly, Helen Hunt, Kate Walsh, Fisher Stevens, Jeremy Piven, Ebbe Roe Smith, Jon Favreau, Lauren Lane, Brent Hinkley, Kate Mulligan, Lee Arenberg and Kyle Gass. In addition to being a risk-taking theater, Robbins said The Actors’ Gang is committed to bringing diverse people together and challenging traditional narratives. He said they don’t want to reinforce people’s opinions, he wants them to think about ideas in ways they haven’t before. “Most actors have open hearts and are empathetic and passionate toward people who are marginalized in our society,” Robbins said. “What I think is unique about The Actors’ Gang is that we have questions where others didn’t question, particularly in times where there’s a prevailing way of thought. I’ve felt it is always necessary for us to not only question the common narrative, but also question our own belief systems.” He explains that he was taught very early on to never assume that the community is one person. It’s about different points of views, different viewpoints, different political opinions, different religions, different ways of thinking about life.

The Actors’ Gang, which prides itself on taking risks and performing shows that are outside the comfort zone of artists and audiences, will also host an anniversary concert at BroadStage on Nov. 12.

“Our job is to tell stories that find the common ground between these disparate elements to create a community in the moments of theater to allow people that might not agree with each other on the outside of the theater to laugh together, to follow a story together that might lead them to a deeper understanding or a deeper caring of something that they hadn’t thought or cared about before,” Robbins said. He said that isn’t always easy, but Actors’ Gang’s character is to not take anything they see on the news for granted, to always question authority and to proceed with the aesthetic that they are storytellers who challenge people to think and feel and open their hearts to people who they might not have opened their hearts to before. It is something he is especially committed to in a time when people are divided. He finds it disturbing that for the first time, people have been required to present a "passport" to attend theater in the form of showing proof of vaccination. “People wanted to protect each other,” Robbins said. “It was a well-intentioned thing. However, it also sent a message, unfortunately, to 40% of your audience that they don’t belong. That is the biggest challenge over the next 10 years…put yourself in the other person’s shoes. How would you, if you were told the thing you love to do on every Friday night, which is to go to a different play, you were told no, you can no longer be in that club because of a medical choice you made. Not only that, you were being told you were an awful person and wanted to kill grandma and are right wing and racist.” Robbins, who is known for starring in “The Shawshank Redemption” and directing “Dead Man Walking,” has continued not only telling the stories of those behind bars, but has invited them into the storytelling. Sixteen years ago, The Actors’ Gang started the Prison Project. It is now running in 14 California prisons, two re-entry facilities and Los Angeles County Probation camps and halls for juveniles. It is a program led by peers and managed by Actors’ Gang teaching artists. Using techniques from commedia dell’arte, it teaches participants to express their emotions and find alternatives to anger. In the original program, there were 25 prisoners participating, 18 of whom had life sentences. The parole board has since found 17 of those 18 suitable for parole. Of all the original participants, 22 have now been freed and are home. Over the years, The Actors’ Gang has done a lot of original work, including plays written by Robbins himself, and taken the work to venues around the world. One of the highlights came in the early years in 1987 when Robbins teamed up with Adam Simon to write a play called “Carnage,” a satire about televangelists. It became the first play to be produced by the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA and would later be invited to be the U.S. representative at the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland. In 2003, Robbins wrote a satire on the Iraq War called “Embedded.” It would run for four months in Los Angeles and then move to New York. “We were doing ‘Embedded’ at a time when it was not acceptable yet to question the Iraq War and we were doing it in the heart of where a lot of the propaganda was coming from in New York City and played six months there to sold-out audiences despite being attacked by various neoconservatives,” Robbins said. “That was a huge, huge moment for the Gang.” Another highlight for Robbins came in 2016 when The Actors’ Gang was taking a musical he had written and directed on tour. The show was “Harlequino: On to Freedom” which combined commedia dell’arte, Shakespearean tragedy, live music and comedy to explore the meaning of freedom. It opened in LA and toured to the Spoleto Festival in Italy to Shanghai and Beijing in China. Robbins described a Shanghai performance where the play ends with the main character being arrested by the state because he is not performing the lines properly. The actors are told to continue doing the play. “The actors continue for a second and then another one of the actors stops the play, puts their hands up and walks out in solidarity,” Robbins said. “At which point the Chinese audience broke into incredible applause in solidarity with this actor who had been shut up, muzzled and arrested by the state. That was just transcendently beautiful for me because we were doing a piece of theater that was allowing people to express a common human desire for freedom in a place that wasn’t free.” In preparing for the anniversary celebration, The Actors’ Gang was originally planning to present a piece of theater where they would do 125 of their past plays in 70 minutes. They started putting it together and Robbins said it just didn’t feel right. What felt right instead, was to revisit “Ubu the King.” “It’s kind of a perfect response to how screwed up everything is right now,” Robbins said. “It’s rude. It’s inappropriate. It’s offensive. It’s funny as hell. I just really wanted to get down in the muck and create something hysterically funny and really dangerous.” They’re scheduling it for late at night because he doesn’t want a polite crowd. “I don’t think this is a time for polite

PHOTOS BY BY PATTY MCGUIRE

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theater or for banal theater,” Robbins said. “It is a time for radical theater. We want to start a new wave of Actors’ Gang anarchy 40 years in.” It is a way of not just talking about their history, but getting back to their punk rock roots and showing who they are and who they plan to continue to be. He draws many similarities to what the world was like 40 years ago and what it is now. Back then, they were watching their idealistic older siblings who had been hippies in the '60s and '70s become yuppies who wanted to change their financial status. Ronald Reagan had just been elected and was making jokes about dropping nuclear bombs. In 2022, Robbins still sees the need for rejecting propaganda and getting down and dirty with who we are and who we are listening to. “We’ve witnessed over the past two years a very divisive and frankly frightening occurrence among ourselves,” Robbins said. “We just witnessed over the past couple of years conformity with a policy that I didn’t think was ever going to be possible in a free country. I’ve witnessed censorship like I’ve never seen it before in the states and I’ve witnessed clever people on both sides of the political aisle using this crisis to create more division and I honestly don’t know where it is headed. I can’t even begin to get my head around why someone wants to divide brother against brother and sister against sister. I can’t even get my mind around that kind of evil. But I do know that evil exists in ‘Ubu the King.’” It's also why The Actors’ Gang waited to reopen its stage. Robbins did not want audiences to have to take a litmus test to get through the doors. “I don’t believe that’s justified,” Robbins said. “We waited until it became possible to share space with people that were unvaccinated.” In the coming years, he hopes to continue the revolution that was started in 1982, that the theater will continue to take risks, to challenge assumptions and to gather people of different views in the same room. “I would hope that future iterations of the Gang know that being on stage is not enough,” Robbins said. “To be an artist, you have to be aware and involved with your community and not locked into a dogma of thought on anything — religion, politics, anything. I think the Actors’ Gang is going to survive because we don’t take ourselves for granted and we don’t take our audiences for granted.”

The Actors’ Gang Theater

9070 Venice Boulevard, Culver City 310-838-4264 theactorsgang.com