In 1981, eight UCLA students started performing theater in unexpected places like garages, art galleries, and street corners. They called themselves The Actors’ Gang. In the four-plus decades since their founding, they’ve gone on national and international tours and established programs to introduce theater to kids and incarcerated people.
“We were a bunch of punk rockers, and we rejected standard-issue theater.… We wanted to do some theater that reflected a punk rock show and the honesty and raw vitality of that,” says Tim Robbins, one of the founders of the company and its artistic director.
Their first production, Ubu the King, ran for six months on a Hollywood stage, playing to punk rockers and adventurous theater-goers alike. Co-founder Brent Hinkley says, “It was like a sprint to the finish line every single night. We went in there, and we just did not stop running.”
They recently restaged Ubu the King as part of their 40th anniversary celebration season and are now running their second production, Methusalem, directed by Brent Hinkley, who originally acted in it, while Robbins directed. Considered a precursor to the theater of the absurd, Ivan Goll wrote it in 1922, and the Actors’ Gang staged it in 1985 after they turned their focus to the study of Commedia dell’Arte.
“It's a visionary play in many ways,” says Robbins. “It’s amazingly relevant to now. … What he was talking about, the themes he was dealing with, were relevant in 1920s Germany and are still relevant today, unfortunately.”
The Actors’ Gang has long focused on making theater accessible to all, offering free summer shows and low-cost tickets during every run, but they also have moved their program outside the theater and into schools and prisons.
Of the programming for children, Robbins says, “It was always a way of bringing kids out of their shell. We're not really there to teach them how to be actors, we're there to get them to have confidence in themselves and be able to speak with a clear voice and make eye contact with other kids. And it's a first step, and it's a liberating step. But my teachers have been telling me how much more essential it is now, post-pandemic than ever before.”
Their work in prisons and with formerly incarcerated people has proved especially meaningful for Robbins. “Joy is not really encouraged in prison, neither is fear or sadness. And there's three key emotions that a lot of incarcerated people have to suppress in order to survive in prison. So when we go in there, we ask for a diverse group of people, from different gangs, to be in the same room. And what happens is truly remarkable. We see transformations in people, we see people liberated from their former selves.”
Hinkley, noting that he has never been one for long-term planning, says, “When we were doing this back in ‘82, ‘81 … it was … for a couple of months out of the year. Never, never would I have dreamed that it would be still going. And it's Tim's passion for it that really has kept it going all this while.”
More: ‘(Im)migrant of the State’: Formerly incarcerated people share stories on stage