A Long-Overdue Risk

Long before he became known as an actor, director, writer and producer, Tim Robbins was making a name for himself on the stage. In 1981, Robbins and a group of friends from UCLA formed a theater company called the Actors’ Gang. The Gang gained prominence in the years that followed, later becoming known for its original, often political work, including the highly acclaimed plays “Violence” and “Carnage.”

This summer, Robbins, 43, returned to the Actors’ Gang as artistic director, creating a stir in the L.A. theater community. As the Actors’ Gang prepares to open its latest productions, “Mephisto” and “The Seagull,” Robbins, along with actors in the company, took time to reflect on 20 years of theater in Los Angeles, where the Gang has been and what’s ahead for the Hollywood-based theater company.

The Actors’ Gang has always been for me an oasis, a place to gather strength in a town that presents such seductive and potentially destructive things to an actor. When I began working in the industry, I would take at least four months out of the year to work with the Gang--putting aside the business, not going to auditions--so that I could concentrate on the piece we were working on. The money I made in movies and television afforded me the luxury to take time and gave me the capital to produce the plays. In order to survive in Hollywood, it was necessary for me to have an outlet for creativity that was not happening for me playing bad guys on television episodics.

The Gang was a group of anarchic, punk rock-inspired actors, and our mission was to approach theater from a similar perspective--to shatter convention and challenge the dullness and complacency of the Reagan years.

Theater for us has never been a showcase to land roles or a place to play it safe. It was, and still is, a dangerous and risk-filled place where it is essential to approach themes that are controversial and socially relevant. I am proud that the group has survived for 20 years, but am most proud that after 20 years, the actors still have the courage to take risks--not only with the work, but with what the future holds.

The first 10 years of the Actors’ Gang provided me with a great training ground in writing and directing. Intensive workshops based on a story line and a social malady would quickly become scripts and, within weeks, fully realized productions. Other productions allowed me the opportunity to learn from, and to realize, the connective tissue of Shakespeare, the Expressionists and Bertolt Brecht to our current theater work.

Ned Bellamy: Our work has always been easily accessible in a comedic way. Because of this, we were able to deal with sensitive political issues of the day and not have it be pedantic. But the experience this summer is completely new territory for us; we’re risking a great deal by taking a much more mature stance with the material that we’ve chosen. We’re asking everybody to lay his or her egos away and explore something entirely new and thoroughly frightening. And that feels good, that feels like an appropriate task for us to embark on, a new ideal for the Actors’ Gang, a new focus, a new form.

When I moved back to New York in 1989, I continued to serve as the artistic director of the group. This was an immensely fulfilling period as others took the reins and introduced concepts and styles. My involvement was to try to allow the growth of other artists and their sensibilities with what I viewed as the group’s creative aesthetic.

Wonderful directors emerging from the group, such as Tracy Young and Brent Hinkley, and visiting artists, such as David Schweizer and Beth Milles, created a great body of high-quality work that broadened our base of support and grew our reputation.

As fulfilling as this was, there were the inevitable conflicts and frustrations of running an organization from 3,000 miles away. Four years ago, I stepped down as artistic director, entrusting decisions to a group of six longtime Gang members. I felt a void and filled it partially with the films I directed.

Creatively, I found the shooting of films, the actual day-to-day process with actors, to be a joy. Figuring out the truth in a character or scene, creating a joint vision of the story we were telling, this was the essence of what I want to do, and these moments of filming brought me great satisfaction. The frustrating thing for me is that in the 10 years I’ve done my three films, those moments of mutual creation add up to only five months. Five months in 10 years.

For years, I’d been longing to revisit the way in which the Actors’ Gang works, or what is referred to as “the Style.” I had seen great work at the Actors’ Gang over the years, but I’d also seen the Style fall at times into insincerity. I felt it was necessary and essential for all of us to revisit the roots of this process and to challenge our perceptions of what the Style is. I began to do this in a workshop in January, but to truly challenge ourselves, I felt it was necessary to go back to the source, the original inspiration for this work.

Georges Bigot had made a profound impression on Los Angeles audiences in 1984 with his performances with the Theatre du Soleil. After the appearance at the Olympic Arts Festival, Georges stayed behind in L.A. to run a workshop in the commedia dell’arte. Three other Gang members and I took this workshop and these magnificent lessons in theater, and brought them to the Gang. Georges remained a friend over the years, and earlier this year, I asked him to come to L.A. and work with us. To our good fortune, he was available and on July 7 began our re-education.

Steve Porter: Coming onstage for the first time for Georges, I was filled with terror, absolute horror. I’m in my mid-40s, I’m making a living in the business, and here I was being asked to throw away what was comfortable, what Georges called my “bag of tricks.” It’s been a huge maturation for me as an actor.

Patti Tippo: Georges had been such a mystical figure for me because I had seen him perform at the Olympic Arts Festival in 1984. It was the feeling of being in the presence of a master.

Adele Robbins: George has an amazing hugeness of spirit and grace and patience. I felt completely and utterly safe.

Susan Dalian: There was no one here that you felt was here longer than anyone else was. It stripped everyone down to the same place, and we were all learning from square one.

Cynthia Ettinger: I knew what Georges was asking each of us to do was to be “naked,” as he says, to be true to ourselves and to share that. It was a stripping away of all this work that we’ve been doing for years. Georges stands so strong and direct in his need to see the truth that everything else falls away, and it really is inspiring and a blessing to have him in our theater.

There are interesting and similar questions raised in “The Seagull” and “Mephisto” regarding the nature of theater. Both plays have dialectics in them on the role of the theater artist and what the relevance of theater is to a society--whether it is the Russia of 1900, the Germany of the 1920s or the Los Angeles of the early 21st century. The plays have forced us to address these questions in ourselves and to reexamine our relationship to theater.

Both plays also have extraordinary humanity in them. An artist such as Chekhov writing 100 years ago survives today because he was able to tap into the truth of the human condition with a complexity and depth and humor that transcend time and trends. Likewise, Ariane Mnouchkine’s adaptation of “Mephisto” takes no easy roads. The choices made by characters in the play are the choices of human beings, not archetypes, and because of this, we understand how the German society was able to fall into moral depravity.

Brian Powell: Discovering the spirit of the actors who worked and struggled and died in Germany has been filling our hearts and minds and kind of walking with us as we go through our day.

Bill Cusack: “Mephisto” shows what some actors did in ‘20s Germany to bear witness to the debauchery of the Nazis, and we are using their work to inspire in us a reconnection to the theater as a way of inspiring our world and our community, and to create theater that bears witness to hope.

A good deal of rumor and misperceptions have been flying since I decided to reinvolve myself with the group. One thing that hasn’t been clear is that I was asked by key members to reinvolve myself.

In December 2000, the Actors’ Gang was a fractious and dysfunctional organization. The state of our financial affairs made it impossible to conduct an audit, a necessity for fund-raising. In the previous year, upward of $40,000 of the Gang’s money had been allocated for a production that ran for only 11 performances. This production was slated to reopen for two months in 2001, while the other 10 months would be rented to other theater companies.

Meanwhile, the condition of the space was in disarray. Aside from the filth, the broken toilets, the flammable materials stored in file drawers and the trash stored in boxes, there was, due to disorganization and an inability to conduct any kind of inventory, a severe depletion of our resources. Our once impressive lighting package was missing 80 lighting instruments; untold tools, musical instruments, props and sound equipment had gone AWOL.

In addition, there was a bitterly divisive feeling. Gang members with whom I had started the company expressed concerns to me that they were thinking of leaving. Longtime members were telling me that the stifling bureaucracy and endless discussions were unbearable. Newer members swam confusedly between the factions.

Five of the six people I had entrusted to run the group told me they didn’t believe it was possible to continue in this way. Their realization after four years was that as much as they were effective actors, they were not up to being administrators. I decided that the only way to assess this situation was to become involved again.

I came out to attend a retreat in December and made plans to run a three-week workshop in January. What I found in the workshop was what had inspired me when we began: actors with incredible talent and courage and a glorious spirit. Aside from working onstage, I talked to them about where they wanted to go as a group and what problems they were experiencing. At the end of the workshops, we had a meeting and I laid out a list of proposals (based on my discussions) that I felt would be necessary for the Gang to continue. There were people who weren’t enthusiastic about my reinvolvement, but there were more encouraging it, having reached a frustration with the internal strife and stifling bureaucracy. Two-thirds of the nine-member board and two-thirds of the Gang empowered me to make changes.

We began in mid-June with a housecleaning. Volunteers from the Gang started sifting through seven years of storage, clutter and dirt. Cleaning started. On July 1, we began workshops in the evening while renovation continued during the day. I don’t think anyone in the Gang would tell you that they have ever worked as hard as they did this summer. The collective reinvolvement and reinvestment in the group speak volumes about members’ decision to make it work, and inspired me to renew my own commitment as artistic director.

In the middle of this inspiring and uplifting time, we were visited by the negativism of the past in the form of an article in one of L.A.’s alternative papers. The author, who had just had a play of his produced by six or so disgruntled members of the Gang, chose not to speak to the overwhelming majority of the Gang that supported the change. Had he made it clear that it was advocacy and not objectivity that fueled his piece, I would have been able to stomach it. But he was Christy masquerading as Murrow, and the Gang and I found it offensive, patronizing and ill-informed. To be in the middle of some of their most productive work in years and read barbs and stings on their actions was disappointing.

In the end, the article was an obstacle in much the same way that the divisiveness had been to the group for the past couple of years. So we collectively decided we would move on, and viewed the article as a last gasp of negativism before what we hope will be a productive, positive future.

Both “The Seagull” and “Mephisto” are daunting challenges, and whether we are up to the challenge remains to be seen. What is most important is that we have found a way to open a door to the future with a deepened commitment to theater and to ourselves.

Brent Hinkley: At the Gang, we have in the past chosen to fly out of the gates from the start. With Georges, we first learn to crawl before we talk, walk before we run, and run before we fly. I have learned more about acting and myself in the few short months working with Bigot than I have over the past decade at the Gang.

There have been moments of exhaustion and meltdown, and of elation and breakthrough. In all these moments, most important, there has been a support system that allowed for weakness and failure as essential building blocks in the creative process. Discoveries made in these moments proved as essential as those made in times of strength and success.

Steve Porter: Last night was a magical moment for me. Seeing an actor onstage that I’ve known for over 20 years, that I grew up with, who was being so honest, so real and so forthright broke me down.

Mounting any production, let alone two, is always a Herculean task. In recent weeks, those challenges have grown tenfold. A huge obstacle of grief, fear and loss has been placed in front of us. We have had to find a way to gather strength and remain focused on our mission as our hearts go out to victims of the Sept. 11 attack and our sense of security in this world is compromised.

Both “Seagull” and “Mephisto” take place in societies in turmoil, and in recent days we have come to understand these societies in a profoundly different way. What we may have understood intellectually about the worlds of these plays, we now feel viscerally. It has become all too true.

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“The Seagull” and “Mephisto” run in repertory at Actors’ Gang Theatre, 6209 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood . “The Seagull” opened Friday; “Mephisto” opens Nov. 2. Both end in January. $15-$20. Call for schedule: (323) 465-0566.