An Offstage Drama at Actors’ Gang

In four to six shows a week since Oct. 11, the Actors’ Gang company has been exploring on stage the role of the theater in society. For 20 years, the same company has been experimenting offstage with the role of democracy in the theater. In both cases, the results look mixed at the moment--but difficult to ignore.

And in both cases, the results have much to do with Tim Robbins, the company’s once-and-again artistic director, principal benefactor and resident movie star.

While critics have been offering widely varied assessments of the company’s two current shows--mostly disliking “Mephisto” and mostly liking “The Seagull,” both of which feature theater folk grappling with social distress--the board members and company members have become featured characters in a drama being closely watched throughout Los Angeles’ theater community. The central question: In his rush to reshape the company, has Robbins rescued the Actors’ Gang or undermined a delicate democracy?

Ten months ago, the Actors’ Gang was a theater collective working to wean itself from dependence on Robbins, struggling to make its decision-making more democratic and frequently renting out its performance spaces to pay the bills.

Now none of those conditions applies. Actor-writer-director-producer and political activist Robbins is back in the artistic director slot he left behind in late 1996. The nonprofit company’s two full-time staffers, including the managing director who had been with the company for more than a decade, have been replaced. Two members of the board of directors have resigned in the last month. A third expresses doubts about the company’s direction. Meanwhile, four new board members have arrived.

Scores of small theater companies in Los Angeles might wish for high-powered sponsorship like the Actors’ Gang’s to swell their budgets. But the recent adventures of the company show the two-edged nature of such relationships and the complications of being Tim Robbins.

“It’s called limousine liberalism,” said Kyle Gass, a member of the company from the days when he and Robbins were both UCLA students. Gass, best known nationwide as half of the tongue-in-cheek rock music duo Tenacious D, lives with longtime company member, playwright and director Tracy Young, whose “Dream Play” was dropped from the Actors’ Gang schedule after Robbins returned early this year.

Robbins, meanwhile, says the company is stronger than it’s ever been and suggests that public preoccupation with his celebrity, not any threat to democracy, has kept the controversy simmering.

“Last I checked, majority rule is indicative of a democratic process,” Robbins said in an e-mail interview, citing the 6-3 board vote in February that brought him back as artistic director of the theater. To suggest that he staged some sort of coup, he said, “is insulting to the independent character and spirit of the adults in the Actors’ Gang who made this decision.”

Robbins, 43, undeniably occupies center stage in the Gang’s future. He co-founded the troupe as a UCLA student in 1981 and continued to serve as artistic director while advancing in the film business as an actor, director, writer and producer--even after moving to New York in 1989.

Four years ago, his fame and wealth considerably grown and demands on his time much-multiplied, Robbins stepped back from the troupe, reducing his financial contributions and leaving decision-making in the hands of others. Until February of this year, a committee of company members made many of the decisions.

Since his return, Robbins has taken over programming decisions and contributed more than $200,000 to the company, board members said. Robbins has said the Actors’ Gang had become “a fractious and dysfunctional organization,” its facilities and financial records in disarray, its leadership balancing the books by renting the main theater space out to other companies for 10 months of 2001. The new structure, board members note, is roughly the same arrangement that’s used by most major theater companies in town.

While the debate persists offstage, the company’s work--a pair of original productions that will run in repertory at least through mid-December--has been as ambitious as ever; some say even more so. Board member Susan Mason, who voted against Robbins’ return, is quick to say the company’s season-opening staging of Chekhov’s “The Seagull” was “a stunning production.” That production opened in October under the direction of Georges Bigot, whose work during the Olympic Arts Festival in 1984 helped inspire the Actors’ Gang in its fledgling years. (The company leases a 99-seat theater and a 40-seat space, known as El Centro, on Santa Monica Boulevard.)

Robbins directed the company’s other new production, “Mephisto,” which opened Nov. 1. The story, adapted by Ariane Mnouchkine from a novel by Klaus Mann, follows an actor in Hitler’s Germany whose ambitions tempt him to moral compromise.

Nobody can accuse Robbins and company of aiming low. “Seagull” and “Mephisto,” in examining the role of the artist in society, carry particular resonance in the aftermath of Sept. 11. In his bid to change the company’s direction, Robbins has called for more emphasis on such original productions, saying the theater should be “a dangerous and risk-filled place where it is essential to approach themes that are controversial and socially relevant.”

Before Robbins returned, “a lot of us were very unhappy with the process that had developed,” said Bill Morgan, president of the company’s board. “It’s hard to get anything done by committee, particularly when there are choices to be made on artistic and business matters.”

And so, when Robbins stepped up with an alternative plan heavily weighted with his philosophy and the likelihood of money to follow, six of nine board members embraced it.

“Tim had a great plan. Not only did he have a great vision, but he put his time and his money where his mouth was,” said Morgan. “I tried to mediate and make it possible for both sides to be happy. But there came a point at which it was obvious that was not going to happen.”

On the unhappy side was managing director Mark Seldis, who spent more than a decade with the company before the board, at Robbins’ behest, dropped him from the management team.

“There was a process going on that didn’t get completed,” said Seldis. “I’m just sad that it had to be so divisive and adversarial.”

Board member Mason, a Cal State Los Angeles theater professor who supported the further democratization of the company, acknowledged that it may have seemed chaotic last year. But, she said, “to me, that didn’t look like chaos. To me, it looked like a company in a critical, empowering stage of self-determination.”

Board member Corbett Barklie, an arts administrator who voted against Robbins’ return, said she saw no signs of a crisis in company finances and she worries that the company’s prospects are too dependent on the commitment of one very busy man.

“I think the proof is really going to be in the pudding later on,” Barklie said. “Once these shows open and close, is there going to be a continuity of leadership?”

As the company’s annual budget stands, Morgan said, about half of the year’s $400,000 to $500,000 budget will come from Robbins. As part of Robbins’ return, the company did away with the jobs of managing director Seldis and production manager Don Luce. In July, the company added producing director Veronica Brady. A new managing director, Greg Reiner, arrived later.

But the change in direction has apparently cost the company some allies. Two board members quit in October. Actress Barbara Bain declined to give reasons for her departure. Attorney Judy Gordon, who also quit, said she’d joined the board in 1999 expecting a more hands-on role in the company’s direction. The new alignment, Gordon said, “is kind of a return to a previous era. You could look at it, I suppose, as being less democratic--one visionary deciding where things are going.”

Morgan said he wouldn’t be surprised to see one or two more board members go. But Robbins has joined the board and brought along entertainment executive Jeffrey Berg (whose firm, ICM, represents the actor), Robbins’ longtime accountant, Richard Marcus, who will serve as treasurer; and Kyle Neal, an attorney who works with nonprofit organizations. (Other board members include actors Annette Bening and Giancarlo Esposito; Mark Taper Forum associate artistic director Robert Egan; and writer Ebbe Roe Smith.)

Among company members, attrition is difficult to track. Gass, for instance, was listed as a company member as recently as last week and performed in the Gang’s “ Love Act” last year. In addition, he and Tenacious D partner Jack Black (also a longtime company member) have been donating a portion of the duo’s T-shirt revenues to the theater company. But in the larger scheme of things, Gass said, his career began to lead him away from the company well before “the schism” arose.

The Actors’ Gang Web site listed 43 members last week. (It’s since been streamlined and doesn’t include a roster.) Of those, Robbins said, about 25 have been involved in the current productions and 10 more remain active or in touch. (Tracy Young, whose name was also on the Web site roster, did not return phone calls.)

There’s no paperwork to fill out when you join and none when you quit, Morgan noted, but he added, “We are going through a natural winnowing process, where you find the people who are committed to the new direction the company is taking.” Meanwhile, the shows go on. Reiner said audiences for “The Seagull” have been “OK,” with houses about 50% full. Early sales for “Mephisto,” Reiner said, were moving faster.

After all the turmoil that preceded this season, said Mason, “the actors just need some kind of stability to work in. I’d rather the actors have their trauma onstage rather than offstage.”