[music]

Andy Dufresne: That's the beauty of music. They can't get that from you. Haven't you ever felt that way about music?

Red: I played a mean harmonica as a younger man. Lost interest in it though. Didn't make much sense in here.

Tim: Here's where it makes the most sense. You need it so you don't forget.

Melissa Harris-Perry: That was academy award winner Tim Robbins starring alongside Morgan Freeman in 1994's Shawshank Redemption. Now Robbins has an extensive onstage in-theater career that started back in the 1980s when he co-founded the Actors' Gang in Los Angeles. Now just over four decades later, the Actors' Gang is returning to their roots with a reprise of their first show. It comes at a time when Robins is thinking a lot about the theater, not only as a space for creative work but as a place for the social gatherings that undergird democracy.

Tim Robbins: We started at UCLA, where a bunch of young punks really, we liked punk rock music. We wanted to make theater that was vital and exciting like the punk rock concerts we were going to. We wanted to do theater that talked about the world we're living in. At the time, it was the Reagan years, we had a political point of view that was opposed to that.

We also were some quite talented actors and the people that were in Ubu the King 40 years ago were a great group of talented, committed actors and because of the success of our first production out of UCLA, Ubu the King, we became a company. I have to say I have to be very grateful for the press at the time because at the time, we had many papers in Los Angeles and we were just right out of college, and Los Angeles Times, The Harold Examiner, and The LA Weekly and The LA Reader all came, all sent reviewers.

This was incredibly supportive environment to walk into in 1982 in Los Angeles. Because we had that success, we felt we have a voice, we have something to say. That's where it started. I started getting lucky getting jobs. Instead of funding Ubu the King on the money I earned as a pizza delivery boy, I was now able to pay for more sets, costumes, et cetera. Then eventually got a theater on Santa Monica Boulevard in 1993.

Melissa: Speaking of Ubu the King, you're coming back to that, right?

Tim: Yes. It's so much fun. I got to tell you I have been having more fun in rehearsal with this cast than I have for such a long time. We're just having belly laughs and the play is, I don't know how many of your listeners are aware, but is one of the most outrageous crazy scatalogical plays ever written. Written in 1896 by the early surrealist named Alfred Jarry.

At its first performance, the Parisian audience was so incensed that they rioted and tore up the seats of the theater and threw them onto the stage. When I was reading it because I was looking for a published play to do, I was going to be a director of a one-act in [unintelligible 00:03:19]. I read the stage direction, "a pal content explodes" and then I read another stage direction, "the entire Russian army enters".

I thought, "Oh, my goodness, how do you stage that? How do we make that work?" I got so intrigued that I jumped into it and wound up being one of the most creative moments of my life because my imagination was on fire. I had actors whose imaginations were on fire and we were able to create magic out of zero budget. It actually laid the foundation for the actors' game.

We did a screening this summer of the original video from Ubu the King from 1982. I had a whole bunch of gang members come and young gang members just joined the company. Unbelievable response, but one of the greatest things was that the young people in the company were like, "We have to do this play." I'm like, "I'm not so sure. I don't know." "No, we have to do this play. Let's do a reading of it."

After we did the reading, we were all just like, "Yes, yes. We got to do this." It's so outrageous and so fun and so inappropriate and so wrong that we were just like, " Okay, let's stop pretending to do any highfalutin thing for our 40th anniversary. Let's go back to the roots."

Melissa: I really love this idea of, "So, we've got no money and the entire Russian army has to enter. We have to create something that isn't obvious. That isn't just enter stage left one person." What can our collective experiences of the theater teach us about creating democracy?

Tim: I can apply it to something I've always come upon which is that limitations are often the best inspirations that when you don't have a huge budget, you have to figure out how to make connections without sparkle and explosions. It demands humility as well, and also a sense of living in the unknowing that we don't have to be experts. That part of the human experience is learning how to say you are wrong and learning how to have humility in a creative environment where you might not be the expert.

This is something I've taken from lessons from many great masters that I've worked with including Robert Altman, including discussion I had with Peter Brook. The idea that we are capable of so much without a huge budget in the arts regarding the society at large, how do we open up dialogues? I'll just say that when we walk into a new school, for example, when we're about to teach kids in the LA USD system or when we walk into a prison and start a new prison project.

We're currently in 14 prisons in the state of California. We have to walk in with humility. We can't walk in as experts. We have to gain trust. If you talk about community building, that's essential. No one wants to go meet with someone that says, "I know everything and you're all wrong about everything." People want to have a common experience.

Melissa: You mentioned some of the spaces that the Actors' Gang walks into. Can you talk a bit about the prison project?

Tim: It started with an actress named Sabra Williams who came to me and asked if she could start a program inside a prison. She had done some work like this in the UK and I gave her a budget and we started it and we started to find out that the way that we work, the discipline that we work in the Actors' Gang was something that incarcerated men and women responded to.

We had to adjust. We didn't have it all right at the beginning. We had to figure out a new way to do things with this different population. At the core, our demand for emotional honesty and the physical nature of the work that we do was something that was immediately something that helped and you could see it. Then, as we got better at it, we started to understand that not only was this providing a distraction for incarcerated people, in fact, it might have been doing the opposite.

It was actually getting inside them and profoundly changing the way they look at their own imprisonment and their own emotions in that imprisonment. To be clear there is one emotion that is appropriate emotion for survival in prison and that is anger. Everyone has their anger face to survive. You don't show sadness, you don't show fear, you rarely show happiness. All of these men, women from various races, different gangs, we asked for that.

We asked for rival gangs to be in the same room, have to go through emotional exercises, choosing emotions with the buffer, of course, of playing a character from the Commedia dell'arte. They're not really expressing their own fear, it's the fear of the Capitano or the fear of the Latino. We give them this buffer and they're able to express emotions as they tell us that they haven't expressed for sometimes 30, 40 years.

To be able to show fear and get a laugh out of it or to show sadness and to have people looking at them with empathy is a huge thing. The other thing that happens is that when they're doing exercises, we take them to a funeral of one of the characters and they all lay down a flower on the grave and they say a couple quiet words over the grave and then the facilitator says, "Now look at each other."

They see in the eyes of their supposed enemy a human being with a shared emotion and they immediately have an empathy for someone that you would never have had empathy for before. That creates a brotherhood and a sisterhood and a bond that oftentimes is far deeper than the bonds they have developed in prisons to survive. They often tell us that the real masks that they were wearing were on the yard and that they're more than that. They're more than that angry person.

Melissa: As you are talking about the need to wear the mask and then the liberatory possibility that occurs through allowing the emotions to show up on stage so that you have a little bit of a buffer. I'm thinking also about the ways that that is an incredibly important tool potentially for young people. Can you talk about some of the work that the Actors Gang has done with young people?

Tim: It's actually really incredible what happens because kids are told if not out outright and direct that they should have one emotion. Parents authority figures. Teachers are comfortable with children when they're happy. "Don't be sad. What are you sad about? What are you scaredy cat? Don't be scared. Don't you ever be angry with me." All these legitimate emotions that these children have anger, fear, sadness are for their entire lives being suppressed. Just be happy.

That makes me comfortable as an adult. That makes me comfortable as a teacher and so we allow a safe space where kids can come in dress up, play a character, and express any emotion they want, to any degree they want. They can be furious, they can be terrified, they can be in sorrow, and it's okay. It's safe and all the other kids are doing it too so they see that what-- we're not about training kids to be actors or to go into the profession.

We're into awakening a voice and a confidence in that voice that every kid has a story to tell. Every kid's story is legitimate and everyone is important and your emotions are important. You don't deny emotions that only gets you in trouble. Express it and stand up straight and say it with all your voice. That we've found has had a profound effect on kids. The teachers in the schools that we work with say their grades improved.

The parents are saying things like, "He's speaking up for the first time. He's standing confidently in front of a class. Thank you so much." This is the work that goes back to our own training at the Actors Gang, where we learned it which was from a great teacher named George Vigo from the [unintelligible 00:12:39] and it was all about this shared community.

That's what theater is. When you walk on stage never assume that any audience member could afford that ticket and on top of that assume that they spent their last dollar on it and had to walk five miles. That's what you owe your community when you step out on stage. From that aesthetic, we at the Actors Gang took that back, not only to the work that we did on stage, but we felt we can do this in the community. We have the resources, we have the talent, we have the people. Let's do it.

Melissa: 40 years of the Actors Gang, 20 years of the youth programs, the work in the prison project. What are you hoping to leave as a legacy?

Tim: One of the things I've loved about the experience of the Actors Gang is being able to tour all over the world and being able to take our stories throughout the world. One of those we've done several productions. We've been on five continents in 40 states and we all have this deep appreciation of that. What's really cool for me is when we can go into a theater festival and be performing on a old Roman theater that's 2,000 years old doing a Midsummer Night's Dream.

What we're doing a Midsummer Night's Dream with is no set is just our bodies and a few props of sticks and flowers and leaves and we're able to create a magical experience with basically nothing of monetary value on the stage. For me, I hope that those shows that we've done throughout the world and in Los Angeles, and throughout the United States. I hope that people come to that and realize that theater doesn't need a huge budget. Theater needs an imagination, an actor, and an audience member. That's the essence of theater.

Melissa: Tim Robbins is founder and creative director of the Actors Gang and he's an Oscar-award-winning actor, director, and musician, and a pretty thoughtful guy. Thanks for joining us, Tim.

Tim Robbins: My pleasure. Thank you.

Melissa: The 40th anniversary revival of Ubu the King is running through November 19th at the Actors Gang Theater in Los Angeles.

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