Tim Robbins Believes In The Power Of Theater

We the people make a free press possible. Together we hold power to account with reporting for the public, funded by the public. It takes all of us to protect the future of public media. Make your gift now at donate.npr.org. This is Fresh Air, I'm Tanya Mosley, and my guest today is Tim Robbins, Academy Award-winning actor, director, and founder of The Actors Gang, a theater company he started in Los Angeles back in 1981 with a group of fellow UCLA students.

We sat down in October in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, after a live performance of his new play, Topsy Turvy, at the Kohler Arts Center. Sheboygan itself is a small lakeside city right next to Kohler, a place with a rich art scene. The performance was part of the city's first film festival, which wrapped with a 30th anniversary screening of Dead Man Walking, the second film Robbins directed. Topsy Turvy is about a chorus that's lost its ability to sing together after the pandemic's long isolation. A metaphor that hits uncomfortably close to home for many.

And in a way, it connects to what Robbins has explored for more than 40 years, and possible reconciliations between people with opposing beliefs, between guilt and redemption, between isolation and connection. From the Shawshank Redemption to Bob Roberts to his prison theater work with the actors gang, he circles around one question. How do we find harmony when we've forgotten how to listen? Robbins and I talked about why he's taking an experimental play on the road instead of making another prestige TV show, and I asked him about how the COVID lockdown and the isolation that followed affected him. Here's our conversation.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (50 minutes, 7,382 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.