Within one week this past February, the prolific actor, activist, and director Tim Robbins had back-to-back screen and stage premieres. On Feb. 11, his TV series Here and Now launched on HBO, with Robbins portraying Greg Boatwright, a philosophy professor and parent (with wife therapist Audrey Bayer played by Holly Hunter). In the series, Boatwright’s multi-racial family struggles not only with normal modern day pressures like gender-fluidity, but strange visions and coincidences as well. “It gets weirder,” promises Robbins.
He also directed the immigration-themed, The New Colossus, which opened Feb. 17. The play’s title is from poet and immigrant advocate Emma Lazarus’s sonnet of the same name, written to raise money for a pedestal for the Statue of Liberty. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” the poet imagined the welcoming statue saying.
Robbins co-wrote The New Colossus with the Actors’ Gang ensemble, which Robbins helped found more than 35 years ago. Cast members drew on their personal backgrounds to relate the plights of refugees fleeing oppression from far-flung corners of the globe. The play humanizes Lazarus’s “homeless, tempest-tost”—immigrants—who are today increasingly vilified.
Musician Jackson Browne, who attended the premiere of this one-act play, told The Progressive, “You hear so many stories, told in languages we don’t speak. Yet we understand their common experience, our common experience—all people come from somewhere.”
Going against the ideological grain is nothing new for Robbins. In 1995, he tackled capital punishment and was Oscar-nominated for directing Dead Man Walking. Robbins challenged the Bush regime with his anti-Iraq war play, Embedded, and with an anti-torture dramatization of George Orwell’s 1984, presented by the Actors’ Gang.
In a recent interview, Tim Robbins discussed his new play about the world’s biggest mass migration crisis since WWII, and the anti-racist, philosophical HBO series he co-stars in.
Q: Why is the Actors’ Gang presenting The New Colossus now?
Tim Robbins: We tend to look at the world around us and develop pieces that are relevant to the times, and have been working on this since the Syrian refugee crisis. Trump didn’t create the anti-immigration feeling in this country; he threw out the red meat to encourage a sentiment that was unfortunately pervasive.
Trump didn’t create the anti-immigration feeling in this country; he threw out the red meat to encourage a sentiment that was unfortunately pervasive.
Q: The refugee and immigrant characters who appear together in the play are actually from different eras.
Robbins: We wanted to tell the larger picture about who we are as a nation and draw parallels between the immigrants of the 19th and early 20th centuries and today.
Q: Why is Louisiana’s Sadie Duncan, a US citizen, among the foreign-born asylum seekers in the play?
Robbins: The story she is telling is from 1868, a time when many African Americans fled the South due to a rise in domestic terrorism from groups like the Ku Klux Klan. We saw this massive movement of African Americans as a legitimate story of people seeking a safer and less violent life.
Q: Why do you think America, traditionally considered to be a nation of immigrants, has recently been so lacking in compassion toward exiles?
Robbins: A massive propaganda campaign by moneyed interests in the United States has, for the last forty years, sowed division and racism in the hearts and minds of poor and middle class Americans. It’s classic divide and conquer. As long as the working class distrusts and fights with each other they will never realize how much they have in common, and that they have the power to demand real change.
Q: Tell us about your new HBO series Here and Now.
Robbins: It’s a story about a family and all the interpersonal challenges that presents. It is also about what it is to be alive in the United States right now and face the challenges of a newly emboldened racism.
I play the father of a family with adopted children. My character is dealing with a crisis of his own, and that struggle is exacerbated by the anger and powerlessness he feels in today’s world. He is one of many people in this country who have worked for social progress and who have seen their efforts being rolled back by nationalist rhetoric and legislation.
Q: Your Here and Now co-star is Holly Hunter. Can you tell us about working with her?
Robbins: It was great. I love Holly because she is one of those actors that creates complicated characters. She doesn’t pander to an audience to try to get them to like her. The work she is doing is filled with humanity and compassion, but she’s not afraid to show the underside.
Q: Alan Ball, who created Here and Now, won a screenwriting Oscar for 1999’s American Beauty and a directing Emmy for his HBO series, Six Feet Under. What is Alan Ball like?
Robbins: Alan has a great understanding of the complexity of human nature. Nothing is black and white, no good guys or bad guys, just a whole universe of unique and complicated humans trying to work through this life. Characters with love, humanity, and compassion, all with the capability of doing something stupid or self destructive, yet also capable of the extraordinary.
Ed Rampell is a film historian and critic based in Los Angeles. Rampell is the author of Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States and he co-authored The Hawaii Movie and Television Book, whose third edition dropped in March. This first appeared at Progressive.org.
From The Progressive Populist, April 15, 2018
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