Tim Robbins and his Actors’ Gang bring Orwell to town
By Joe Pollack
Tim Robbins is on the phone. It’s been 18 years since Bull Durham, but his performance as Ebby Calvin LaLoosh, better known as Nuke, remains one of the finest portrayals of a professional athlete ever to reach the screen, and the film remains one of the finest sports movies ever.
Robbins, of course, is the only baseball-playing movie star ever to be invited—and then disinvited—by the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame, which decided to mark the 15th anniversary of the movie in 2003 at Cooperstown. Press releases had been mailed, invitations delivered, but Robbins’ invitation was canceled after the actor spoke out against the invasion of Iraq. According to a Hall of Fame lackey, a Robbins visit to Cooperstown would be “a danger.”
A more current example of the danger Robbins poses will be on display February 16 and 17 at Washington University’s Edison Theatre, when The Actors’ Gang arrives to produce 1984, a play based on George Orwell’s famous 1948 novel, adapted by Michael Gene Sullivan and directed by Robbins. It opened at the Gang’s theater, the Ivy Substation, located in the Los Angeles suburb of Culver City, last February and has been touring since that run ended. The original cast is mostly in place, with Brent Hinckley as protagonist Winston Smith.
“It was unnecessary to make changes in the book,” Robbins says. “Orwell said it all—including the great line ‘In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act’—and it remains true.”
Robbins was a co-founder, and is artistic director, of The Actors’ Gang, which he organized with fellow UCLA classmates in 1982. “We do a couple of mainstage productions every year,” he says, “and three or four smaller things, like workshops and readings. I like to think that we work in the old commedia dell’arte tradition.” Like so many small theater companies, The Actors’ Gang depends on corporate and private funding, and was an itinerant organization until it built its 99-seat house a couple of years ago—“with parking,” he adds, a happy note entering his voice. (L.A., by the way, has many 99-seat theaters; their size enables them to avoid certain union rules and attract movie actors looking to try something a little different.)
Born in the Los Angeles area, Robbins spent much of his childhood in New York, where his father, Gil, worked as a singer and was a member of the Highwaymen. The younger Robbins is an alumnus of Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan but returned to California to attend the UCLA drama school made famous in Frank McCourt’s memoir Teacher Man.
“I began acting in some off-off-Broadway productions in the early ’70s,” Robbins recalls, “but I realized how much I did not know and enrolled at UCLA.”
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