http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,26070386-16947,00.html
September 19, 2009
Tim Robbins wears his director's hat to talk to Rosemary Sorensen
about acting, politics and humanity ahead of his company's Brisbane
Festival appearances
--
TIM Robbins leaps from his chair in a modest, dimly lit downtown
restaurant in New York and stands to attention, acting out the part
of the third guard from the left in some imagined play about intrigue
in a royal court.
"Here's the thing," he says, a favourite expression, used when he
wants to gather your attention, ready for a good, long, passionate
exposition on anything from American vote-rigging to the "beige"
performances of most young actors these days.
"Every character in a major play has a complete state of emotion,
whether you're the queen, who thinks there's a coup d'etat about to
happen, or whether you're the soldier protecting her. This guy in the
play" - and this is him now, standing to his full, considerable
height, alongside the restaurant table - "goes out there, doesn't say
a word, can't wait to get off" - one leg sags, his head droops a
little, the look on his face is peevish - "and you see this in
productions. They're all bored."
What he learned from celebrated actor Georges Bigot, from French
ensemble Theatre du Soleil, is that if that soldier, standing on the
stage, mute, is really "in emotion", he has "amazing power".
Robbins straightens up and his face hardens. "If you're doing that
job, you're ready to kill. You have that spear out and it's going
through someone's heart, that's the murderer you have to be, the
protector. I saw that in a Theatre du Soleil production. These guys
are on stage like that, looking around as though they could react
with murder if they had to. You feel this power."
The lesson he took from working with Bigot was that "every moment
counts on stage. Realism is not enough, naturalism is not enough,
truth is what matters."
Robbins is a great talker and constantly the showman, although not at
all showy in that insincere way many celebrities develop. He is
comfortable with himself and that makes him congenial company. He
knows how to talk about himself in a relaxed manner without wariness
or triteness. "I don't mind celebrity," he says, simply.
He lives in Manhattan with actress Susan Sarandon and the younger of
their two sons, just a few blocks from where he grew up and went to school.
Strolling around the corner from where he lives to be interviewed,
Robbins has almost old-fashioned good manners. He is polite, friendly
and generous with his time.
He has come to talk about a production his Los Angeles-based theatre
company, the Actors' Gang, is bringing to the Brisbane Festival, The
Trial of the Catonsville Nine. But it soon becomes clear there is no
division, for Robbins, between theatre and life, between what matters
on stage and out on the streets of New York. In fact, that is where
his acting career started.
He grew up in Greenwich Village, "surrounded by people who were
active and involved". His father was a folk singer, his mother reared
the children, then went to work in a magazine distribution company.
She would eventually help him get his first full-time job, in a
warehouse in LA. The year he spent working there gave him the
determination to succeed in the theatre, to use his imagination and
considerable brains.
When he was just 13 he joined a street-theatre group during school
summer holidays. Until he left school, for five years, he joined the
troupe each summer, working from the back of a truck, setting up in
parks across the city to perform a kind of satirical vaudeville, in
response to whatever was happening in New York at the time.
"Ten in New York is 15 or 20 elsewhere," he says of his youthful
street-smart persona.
Brought up Catholic and still "filled with guilt", it was the
diversity and wackiness of Greenwich Village life he remembers most.
He would visit the apartment of one young friend, a German boy whose
parents kept Nazi memorabilia on their walls, then lope off down the
street dodging nodes of happy hippies. No blacks, though. "There was
a rule when I was growing up that no black goes south of Houston
Street," he recalls.
Greenwich Village, now so posh it has almost lost the raggle-taggle
atmosphere that so beguiled the young Robbins, was a "volatile
environment to grow up in", racist and middle-class, but with an
energy that encouraged dissent. Robbins remembers his mother coming
into his room in the early 1970s and saying: "You should be very
proud of your sister, she was arrested today." She had demonstrated
against the Vietnam war.
He was too young to take in much about the Catonsville Nine when, in
1968, a group of Catholics publicly burned draft papers to protest
against the Vietnam war and were tried and sent to jail. But it was
the kind of civil disobedience, by otherwise conservative people
prepared to stand up for what they believed was right, that impressed
Robbins and shaped his life, private and public.
The Trial of the Catonsville Nine was written by one of the priests
who was imprisoned, Daniel Berrigan. About three years ago, at the
suggestion of an old friend who used to run an experimental theatre
in LA, where the play was first produced, Robbins decided to do a
reading as a fundraiser for the Actors' Gang. That encouraged the
company to develop it for the stage, and that production, directed by
Robbins, is coming to Brisbane. (Robbins is unable to come, but his
sister, Adele, is in the cast.)
While The Trial of the Catonsville Nine is about acts of defiance,
Robbins calls it a "beautiful play, filled with gorgeous humanity".
"That's what we need right now, at this moment when people's lives
are filled with a different kind of turmoil, when people are
wondering if they will have a job, and there's less security about
the future," he says. "It's not the time for political satire, it's
the time to be reminded of our collective humanity, where you are
brought to consider your own morality and your involvement in the world."
Catonsville Nine will, Robbins says, "bring an audience together into
some quiet place, where they can reflect, feel their compassion, and
hopefully exit the theatre having laughed, cried and shared those
feelings with the other people in the room." Robbins has long been
associated with political theatre and film-making, in the broad
sense, as an actor in films such as 1994's The Shawshank Redemption,
and as a screenwriter and director when he created Dead Man Walking,
which starred Sarandon alongside Sean Penn.
He formed the Actors' Gang in 1981, when he graduated from the film
school at University of California, Los Angeles. The young man he was
then, as he describes himself, was a kind of jock-punk rock combo, a
big athletic bloke with attitude.
"We were not particularly evolved human beings at that point," he
says. "It was animal, the snarled lip and a major middle finger to
society. We probably weren't an easy place to be for women, in our
company ... but we evolved with time."
He is subtly referring to the fact he once made it, just, into one of
those "sexiest actor" lists. At 50, he is more pleasant than sexy and
his face never had the cut lines of the classic matinee idol, but he
is a man of strong physical presence, his height suggesting power
rather than clumsiness.
The punk part of his personality morphed into his much-admired but
also often criticised determination to speak out on political issues,
most notably his fiery speeches against the US war in Iraq. The jock
part continues to find comfortable expression in his passion for
baseball. Even in his influential 2003 speech to the National Press
Club in Washington, he started and finished his scathing denunciation
of then president George W. Bush's "climate of fear" with jokes about
his baseball fixation.
One of the first productions he performed in with his Actors' Gang
mates was Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi, a perfect vehicle for foul-mouthed
young men who attacked theatre as if it were a rugby maul. He
remembers, too, productions of a "really bad musical" he wrote, and a
"very sexual" A Midsummer Night's Dream, which he now recalls to
boost his feminist credentials.
"From the very first scene," he says of Shakespeare's bawdy poetic
romp through a moonlit forest, "I could see that the play is about
the repression of the female."
The mix of the bawdy and political was what attracted him. From the
early days, the Gang trained according to principles they gleaned
from the commedia dell'arte tradition of improvised comedy that dates
back to 16th-century Italy. This is seriously important ground for Robbins,
"Here's the thing," he begins. "I've got to write a pamphlet or a
book on this because I don't think people get it when you say
commedia. Books talk about the history and the characters, the
possible scenarios, but that misses completely the context.
"Why does art evolve in society? What is it about art that makes it a
necessary expression for the people in that society?"
He describes the standard plot, a tale of the underdog's revenge,
where the clever Harlequin, poor and abused (and probably, in the
early street theatre days, a black slave), turns the tables on the
cruel master by thwarting a love match, a scenario that can be found
in every theatre tradition throughout the world.
"When it gets away from meaning anything, it becomes a clown show,"
Robbins says. "Pantalone beating Harlequin, oh it's so funny, ha ha
ha. No it's not funny, it's scary. We hate that guy who beats our friend."
Putting the meaning back into the stock characters of commedia is the
way the Actors' Gang trains, and central to that training is the use
of masks. He calls it magic, the way an actor is transformed by, and
then must work to transform, the mask.
"First you must look at the mask for a long time, to find out what
you feel for this thing, then with a mirror, bring it to your face to
see what happens.
"The great thing about a mask is, if you're not completely in the
emotion, the mask betrays you. It will not co-operate."
Robbins on acting loses just a little of the bonhomie that seems so
natural. He is slightly fierce.
"Nine out of 10 young actors are more about attitude than deep
emotional commitment," he says. "Either they are not capable, or they
are scared of it, or they think they are going to look like a fool.
It's much easier to play something with attitude than emotion, and
the problem is, that's celebrated.
"If you stay safe with your emotional tools, you're going to create a
performance that is sufficient," and he hisses the word like a nasty
taste, "but you're not going to create a performance that is extraordinary."
It is not, necessarily, the fault of the young actors. Directors must
reject the snarl that has come to replace the emotional truth Robbins
looks for in an actor's eyes. What he sees, more and more, are
directors encouraging performances that are "efficient, pragmatic,
bland, milquetoast, beige".
Robbins is less and less likely to be lured into film projects these
days, and his acting credits have tapered off since the decade that
culminated in his Oscar-winning performance in Clint Eastwood's 2003
film Mystic River. That year was also the time when his conviction
that theatre and life were one and the same manifested in a play he
wrote for the moment and of the moment.
A New Yorker to his bootstraps, pugnacious and always ready to argue,
he decided to speak out against what he believed was the "raging
hypocrisy and incredible lies" behind the Iraq war.
Embedded had its first performance in LA in July 2003, within months
of the initial invasion of Iraq by the US and its coalition forces.
According to Robbins, it electrified the audience.
"I couldn't tell why but I knew something was happening," he recalls.
"At the end, quite a sad ending, I could hear this baleful weeping
and I thought one of the actors had lost it, worrying enough because
you do try to restrain the performers even while you want the
audience to feel it.
"But it turned out it was one of the audience, a woman who came up to
me afterwards, and I don't know how she had found her way into the
theatre in the first place, but she had been training army troops.
She explained to me how terrible she now felt about her involvement
because the war was a big mistake."
Robbins's play had put out for discussion something that was still,
at that moment, too difficult, too delicate, too confusing for people
to talk about. Although they thought it was a risk, they planned for
a four-month season and were astonished when it sold out in two days.
"There was an intense need for it, and that was the whole purpose, to
vent frustrations, to involve a community in a public discussion,
presenting information you could not read even in major newspapers," he says.
Embedded was not a great play, he says, and while he has it on film
for documentary purposes, he doubts the Gang will do it again. But it
made "great theatre".
"What is the ideal play to do in a theatre? Certainly you need
variety, all kinds of stuff, but one thing that you want as a
constant is the ability for a community to be in a room together,
some of them complete strangers, and for them to be taken to a place
emotionally that calls up questions about one's own life and experiences.
"If the emotions are raw, and real, and visceral, the audience has a
collective experience, the laughter and the tears can create a
collective bond. Then it takes you to another level, allowing people
to understand that the thoughts they've been having, their feelings,
are not unique. They're not crazy. Other people feel this way, and
you go out of the theatre thinking, 'I didn't realise my community
was that big.' You feel less alone, and more involved."
Robbins says the impetus to man the barricades, with provocative
speeches and confronting theatre, has quietened in his breast, for
the moment. He is more than happy to take off his activist hat and
set it aside for something more comfortable. He plays music and has
written songs all his life, about life and love, not politics,
recently recording an album.
There is a new play also in the works, but he refuses even to hint at
what it may be about for fear of the bad luck that may bring. If he
never goes on a television chat show again, that will be fine by him,
but it seems pretty clear that one day, sooner or later, something
will cause him to leave his desk or studio, put on his hat, and
stride off to front a public podium again.
"I feel like living in a free society is being free," he says. "If
you feel like you shouldn't say something or act a certain way, then
you're not free. If there's something that pisses me off, I'll talk about it.
"I don't do it every day and I don't do it in the media when it's
unnecessary, but when something's happening and no one is talking
about it, then I can't say no. I get asked why do I think it's
necessary for an actor to do that. It's necessary for any citizen who
feels compelled to speak out."
--
The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, performed by the Actors' Gang, at
the Brisbane Powerhouse for the Brisbane Festival, September 24 to 27.
.
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