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Robbins finds humanity, not politics, in 'The Guys'
By CHRIS PAGE
Get Out

Tim Robbins phones from South Africa, where he's filming the apartheid drama “Hot Stuff.”

It's evening there, and he's exhausted.

Lighting a cigarette and taking a deep puff, he mumbles: A bit about the movie, about being in another country during Hurricane Katrina (“It's frustrating to be here in a time like this,” he says, “because you want to be helping”), about John Roberts' nomination to be chief justice of the United States, about Christian fundamentalists and the pro-life movement (“If they win Roe v. Wade,” he says, “they won't know what to do. They got an awful lot of mileage out of that issue”), about the war in Iraq, of which he's been a vocal opponent.

It's typical Robbins, at least the typical leftist polemic for which the actor, 46, has earned both notoriety and critical ire of late.

But then there's the other side of the man, the side that cares about the art and craft of acting. The part of him, the one that he feels at his core, that knows and loves the power of live theater.

“I was reading this story in The Nation magazine,” Robbins says, perking up. “It was about military recruiting in high school. They concentrate on the sports teams. They completely avoid the drama department.”

He chuckles.

“It's because these are people that are questioning,” he says of his fellow actors. “Because you're interested in telling stories, and part of telling stories is asking questions.”

Last season, the Valley saw Robbins' most polemical fusing of politics and acting with a touring production of “Embedded,” a show he wrote for The Actor's Gang, his Los Angeles-based theater troupe, about the media and the manipulative powers that be during the early stages of the war in Iraq.

The show was bitterly satiric. Almost as sharply edged — but from a source about 350 years earlier — was The Actor's Gang's critically lauded production of Moliere's religious satire “Tartuffe,” which had an extended run earlier this year.

By contrast, the production that his Actor's Gang is touring these days seems positively quaint. Anne Nelson's 2002 play “The Guys,” in which a journalist works with a fire captain to eulogize four of his men lost in the World Trade Center attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

“I don't know that we ever mourned properly. We went from shock to, unfortunately, ‘Shock and Awe,' ” Robbins says, alluding to the decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003. “What this play does is it allows that mourning, in a way that part of mourning is appreciating what is special about an individual. This is a celebration of the lives of four men, told with a lot of humor — because that's part of who they were. It's more about humanity than the politics of (9/11).”

Robbins himself performed the show in New York and Los Angeles. On this tour, the fire captain is performed by P. Adam Walsh — a brilliant young actor who starred in “Tartuffe” — while the journalist is played by Robbins' sister Adele Robbins, a member of the Actor's Gang troupe.

“It's a very moving evening,” Tim Robbins says. “It's not ‘Embedded.' It's more of a poem and a prayer. It's at the core of what theater should be: It's actors taking a journey with an audience.”

‘The Guys'
When: 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday
Where: Nesbitt/Elliott Playhouse
Mesa Arts Center
1 E. Main St.
How much: $35
Info: