LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - OCTOBER 14: Tim Robbins arrives at the premiere of Hulu's "Castle Rock" ... [+]
Academy Award winner Tim Robbins (Best Supporting Actor for Mystic River) has a long and varied film resume. He has starred in comedies such as the baseball hit Bull Durham, with Kevin Costner, and with Robin Williams in Cadillac Man.
But besides his Oscar-winning turn in the Cling Eastwood-helmed Mystic River, he is perhaps best known for his work in the classic 1994 film Shawshank Redemption and for writing and directing the brilliant Dead Man Walking, starring Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon, in an Oscar-winning role.
Having grown up though in a musical family around live audiences and cutting his chops in New York theater, Robbins finds theater and the immediacy of telling stories to an audience his first love. So he founded the theater troupe, The Actors' Gang. an organization for which he still serves as Artistic Director.
Just as musicians faced the challenge of presenting concerts during COVID Robbins' Actors Gang struggled with the same dilemma, as he explained when I spoke with him last week. So how do you get past that?
For Robbins the answer came in the 1970 play Hard Times from Studs Terkel. Robbins realized the way each person tells their story individually directly to the audience worked perfectly for the Zoom era of theater.
So, now the show is running via Zoom, though Robbins hopes once theater opens back up they can present it live, through September 5. I spoke with Robbins about his love of theater, his musical roots, why the play from 50 years ago speaks so much to the times of today and the inspiration he gets from talking to friends and heroes such as Jackson Browne and the late Terkel.
Steve Baltin: I know you are a big music fan. I remember seeing you host the Dead Man Walking concert at the Shrine in 1998. So are there songs you hear in We Live On?
Tim Robbins: For me, it all starts with Woody Guthrie, that whole era of songwriting and essentially storytelling. This is what I've always responded to in music and in songs, the idea that a song can take you into the experience of what Okie migrants were going through at the time. And then also just the songwriters, they were writing about what it is to be homeless and traveling on trains looking for work. The voice that is not normally heard. And that's what I always responded to in music, what kind of stories were the songwriters telling.
Baltin: What songs would be on your playlist for the show?
Robbins: It's so hard when you talk about people you love and to think about the one song. What would be the one song from Tom Waits that encapsulates this experience? That'd be a hard one to come up with right now. But I'd say it's Hezekiah Jenkins, "The Panic Is On," and "Pastures Of Plenty," also I would say "Deportee," [both] Woody Guthrie, because it talks about illegal deportation of U.S. citizens, which is still a problem. And I guess it never dawned on me because part of what I love about music is how it can, in the midst of hard times, lift our spirits. So I think it's important to remind people that in the midst of all this struggle we have to remember the human heart, love and compassion and empathy for others.
Baltin: You say that in your notes. So talk, for you, about the sense of optimism you wanted to convey when you chose this play.
Robbins: When we started this it wasn't with the intention of doing a production. I found very quickly that when we were doing our workshops remotely on Zoom that it was very difficult to do scenes with each other. With the technological limitations of Zoom — the slight delay, it's impossible to get in a rhythm, overlap on dialogue and, in addition, you've got two people in separate rooms pretending to be in the same room. So already there's a disassociation if you're an audience member. So the combination of those factors led us to understanding the way we could still work would be individual storytelling. You can call it monologues if you want. But, for me, I prefer stories that one person would tell to the camera in the Zoom as if that was one person they were talking to in a bar or a coffee house. There's an intimacy to it, a personal connection that we were seeking as we were working on it. It didn't come right way. It's something that we had to find. And eventually we came to find the Studs Terklel material. These voices from the past, these voices of our ancestors, had a complete and total relevance to the stories that are being told today.
Baltin: At what point did you realize this material that is over 50 years old was still relevant today?
Robbins: Immediately, the first night we did it. The first night we started to read the accounts of the depression from Hard Times. At the end of every workshop we have a discussion and it was immediately apparent that this was something that needed to be pursued. We needed to continue to explore this material and see if we could do something with it theatrically. I left off, "Bread And Roses" is a good song too.
Baltin: When did this go from being just an idea to being feasible to pull off?
Robbins: I know exactly the moment. It was in the first performance of the workshop production in June. You gotta understand, going in, none of us had any idea it would play. People have been on Zoom for too long and here we were presenting something on Zoom that's gonna last an hour and 20 minutes. We had an audience coming in, so we had no idea whether they were even going to stay until the end of the show. And what happened was not only did the stay until the end of the show, but 98 percent of them stayed for an hour and 20 of talkback after. It means that not only did they respond so well to hearing these stories, but it had infused something in them that made them want to talk about their own feelings. And isn't that the whole purpose of a gathering place? Whether it's a theater or a concert hall, where you can have a dialogue with the artists. And I don't mean it always has to be an actual dialogue, but that's the whole purpose of going up to tell these stories on a stage, is the hopes it will inspire your audience to tell their own story.
Baltin: Talk about the importance for you of sharing these kinds of stories and putting a human face on the struggles people deal with during this incredibly desensitized time in history.
Robbins: That's the whole purpose of art, isn't it? To remind people of their humanity. When you can reach people's hearts you remind them that they're human. And in the midst of such a divisive time, where it's so divided, I have no interest in anything that furthers that division. It's the importance of telling stories that remind us of our common cause, our common humanity. So I have no interest in doing stories that remind the tribe they're correct and everybody else is wrong. I think as artists that's our biggest challenge right now.
Baltin: What are the works that as you put it remind you of your humanity?
Robbins: It's a combination of being brought up in a family of musicians and witnessing, as a child, Hootenanny's, a shared voice. The audience is part of the show, their voice is just as important as the people on stage. And Pete Seeger was the master at this. He took a terrible, terrible situation, being blacklisted, being forbidden from performing with a group called the Weavers, which was a huge act at the time, multiple record sales, sold-out concerts and now they can't perform. So Pete takes to the road with his banjo, rolls into town, books a town hall or high school auditorium, whatever is available, and goes to a local radio station, says, "I'm Pete Seeger, I used to be in a group called the Weavers and I wonder if you can help me promote the thing." People would come, he'd get up onstage, start playing his banjo and say listen, "I used to be in this group and we used to harmonize pretty well. And I'm gonna need you to help me harmonize on these songs." And wound up with his banjo and blacklisting creating a whole movement of young folk singers that wound up in New York City in the early '60s, including my father. And Joan Baez talked about in her biography, about being a teenager going to a Pete Seeger concert and realizing for the first time in her life that she could sing and she could do what he was doing up onstage. So it's finding the common voice, that harmony that you hear when you're singing along with a whole group of people. It's such a unifying and powerful force, so I guess that's where it all started with me, the idea that part of entertainment is the audience itself. And then I suppose the other huge influence on me about shared humanity and a common story is the films of the 1930s and 1940s that came out of the depression. The [Frank] Capra's, [Preston] Sturges, the screwball comedies. My Man Godfrey was my favorite film, stories that weren't afraid to address the world as it was. But found a way to do it in an entertaining way and in a way that delighted audiences, but also reminded the audiences that they're in this together with other people and that those marginalized people, the forgotten man in [Gregory] La Cava's My Man Godfrey, those people could easily be us.
Baltin: Are there people you've met or talked to that have really inspired you?
Robbins: Absolutely. One of the playwrights we've been producing lately has been Dario Fo, the Italian, Nobel Prize-winning playwright, who we got a chance to meet and perform for when we were in Milan before he died. And I read Accidental Death Of An Anarchist in college and just loved it. I remember the moment too because I realized at that moment I could write plays. So to have had that experience in college where I experienced inspiration from a play and then years later to be able to talk to the master and have him witness and understand what we were doing and give his seal of approval to it was massive. I've been blessed in being able to have relationships and discussions with people that I admire. And those conversations also include Jackson Browne, Robert Altman, Sam Fuller and Studs Terkel himself, who I interviewed in the early '90s. These are our sages, the wisdom that they have not only inspired me as a youth, but also continue to inspire me.
