“Every clown you talk to is afraid to use the C word. It’s not easy to be a clown.” This was one of the many interesting things Stefan Haves, director and creator of Shambles at The Actors’ Gang in Culver City, told me last week. “Clown work is like improv without a net because they’ll love you or hate you in the first 30 seconds.”

Let’s face it, it’s not like horror movies haven’t created a cottage industry out of making clowns something to be feared. Nor did serial killer John Wayne Gacy who probably inspired many a horror film creator. But the best clowns (think David Shiner and Bill Irwin) have an innate ability to entertain and provoke in equal measures.

Haves knows his way around clowning. A random encounter with Shiner lead to his participation in Fool Moon, a show that featured Shiner and Irwin that was given a special Tony Award in 1999. Haves has also spent time working on several Cirque du Soleil shows.

With Shambles, a show that combines clowning with music and aerialists and drag queens and a car wash for the audience (you’ll have to see it to understand), Haves has created an ironically titled show that is full-on entertainment, but with a purpose. As we discussed in our Zoom conversation last week. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity.

It’s the holiday season. As we approach 2023 it seems like our world is in shambles quite a bit. Yet the tone of your show, sight unseen, seems to believe that there is still joy in the world. Is there a sense of irony in the title of this show and do you believe that there is still joy to be found in the world? 

That’s a really great question because I actually pivot every interview to that. I like to say that throughout history – I’m talking all history – after a plague comes a renaissance. I knew that when we were in the middle of this dour time in the pandemic, that we’re all becoming introverted, we’re all becoming insulated, we’re all becoming fearful. Lord knows the introvert in each and every one of us has taken root and is pretty darn happy in our house.

It’s going to be the artists that are going to emerge on the other side. It’s really the artist’s job to forge a new trail for everybody. I looked at it as the most amazing opportunity to assemble the world class introverts who have been not able to work for a long time. I have 17 performers in The Actors’ Gang. I have six band members and a band leader. I have six Cirque du Soleil-caliber variety performers all in the same night. I did the same kind of show ten years ago, but that was ten years ago. Life has changed.

So this one is a very gender-fluid and immersive show, which seems to be two directions that I’m learning from the newer generations. I’ve taken this opportunity to really learn and see what motivates people to get into the theater. 

If I look at what’s been going on even pre-pandemic, but certainly post-pandemic, it seems that pure joy is in rare supply in the performing arts. Has the pandemic and everything that’s gone on in the past two-three years made us so entirely serious that we’ve lost our sense of humor and our sense of joy?

I’m really glad you brought this up because I teach clown and clown is in the here and now experience. So when a guy walks on stage, it’s different than improv. In improv there’s the conceit of the who, what and where, things are supposedly happening off stage. But the clown inhales and exhales with the public and discovers things in the here and now. It brings people out of that mind place and into kind of body intelligence of like what’s going on? The child is alive in all of us, asleep in a lot of us, but alive. We give a funny nod to satire in this, but then we don’t really have a point-of-view. We just want to do like a DreamWorks movie. We want to wink to a cat whose name is Feline Musk taking over planets and then we’re never going to talk about it again.

In the clowns that I’ve always loved it’s the pathos as much as the comedic timing that has attracted me them. If pathos is the flip side of comedy is there a flip side to Shambles? 

We come out like gangbusters. Laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh. All of a sudden it turns around with a song called Walking in Memphis and showing that our actual lead is a lonely man. Then it ends with Hallelujah. So the flip-flop happens, but the flip-flop happens so utterly quick. What I like to say is the clown always has to be hipper than the room. You hate clowns when they’re not like that, when they’re trying to make you laugh. You hate them. That’s why teaching clown is so hard. First 30 seconds you love ’em or hate ’em. You don’t kind of like them. If you kind of like them, you hate ’em.

What makes you laugh? 

Well, laughter is a byproduct. So everybody’s like, oh clown you’re going to make me laugh. No. Buffoons make you laugh. A clown makes you happy and gives you connection. He’s not looking for a laugh. What makes you laugh? An obstacle and what is your prowess getting around that obstacle. It’s very math-oriented as opposed to I hope mommy and daddy like my skit. 

The reason I ask is we’re living in a culture of political correctness and cancel culture. A lot of people who are involved in comedy and the creative arts are concerned that it’s ultimately having a stifling influence on what can be said and how it can be said. Do you have any concerns about the path that we’re headed on and whether this will have a lingering impact and a stifling impact on the creative arts? 

First of all, I’m part of the problem. I’m a 63-year-old baby-boomer white male. My demographic has had a pretty good run for a few thousand years. I have to give over to the fact that for me to have that kind of power other people were marginalized. Although I love Don Rickles, I know Don Rickles wouldn’t work today. However, Don Rickles in his day was inclusive, but that was a generational change. Now do we cancel Don Rickles because he did certain things within the construct of where society was? I don’t know. It’s a tricky thing. People want to cancel Woody Allen and Woody Allen movies because of his personal behavior. Are they going to cancel Charlie Chaplin movies because of his personal behavior or is it just current comedians? So so there’s a real reckoning taking place and there’s a real conversation.

But the thing that I want to pivot from is the blame game that millennials are too fragile to understand. They’re not tough enough. I birthed these kids. So I have a responsibility to find out how we can all go forward and not complain about it; find common ground.

I even had someone say to me when I was teaching clown class “I saw a Robin Williams special. He was kind of creepy.” If you think about it it’s a white guy who’s playing Indian men, Mexicans, Blacks. He’s actually always making dick jokes. He’s doing everything. So I looked at this group of kids that I was with, and I’m like, “He is my idol. I saw him live and he was the most extraordinary being I’ve ever seen.” He fused clown and stand-up.

I said to these kids, “Who do you have today? Let me see and explain to me what it is.” They couldn’t tell me. So I think it’s a slow process of finding who the next person is going to hold the mantle and go across so everybody will be together. But I can’t be judgmental about it.

As you’re discussing Robin Williams I’m thinking he falls under the category, for me, of somebody who was an equal-opportunity offender, which is part of the tradition of comedy.

Absolutely. if you take away archetypes, commedia dell’arte is nothing. If I can’t do a stereotype, I’m dead. 

I saw Bill Irwin in Fool Moon. Then I saw his Tony Award-winning performance in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It gets my mind thinking about the skill set that a clown has to have to be able to pull off both those shows. What do you think we can learn about clowns vis-á-vis someone like Bill Irwin mastering the clowning that he does in Samuel Beckett’s work, that he did in Fool Moon and then have ability to pull off Edward Albee’s dialogue?

We’re talking about a passionate man who loves performance, studies the greats and comedy. It’s very interesting because another thing about working with both Dave and Bill is David is all about flow. Bill is all about structure. David’s the kind of guy who’s like, let me get out there. When I’m in front of the audience it’s going to happen. Bill is give me the structure in which I can kill. That’s an interesting way to look at at different actors. Are you flow-based or are you structure-based? Those guys were the perfect combination for one another. Bill would discipline David and David would take Bill into the histrionic crazy.

What joy does putting together a show like Shambles give you and how do you think that radiates from you through your ensemble and into the audience?

This is the Bermuda Triangle of depression. Between Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s is the time where people feel more isolated, more marginalized. More a microscope on our dysfunctional families. I had a trauma as a kid. My father died around this time when I was nine years old. 40 years ago when I did that first Cardigan Christmas show, I’m like, Oh, these are the people I want to spend the holidays with and we want to invite the rest of our family into the theater.

To actually create a utopian holiday, a theoretic community, for these three weeks, I think that’s a way more healthy place for me to be. All of us in this place, 35 people, we’re the best of us for the hours we’re there. We’re all the best of us and we’re providing and gifting the best of us to other people here in Los Angeles.

Shambles runs at The Actors’ Gang through December 31st.

Photo: Gina Belafonte in Shambles (Photo courtesy The Actors’ Gang)

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“I think it is essential right now to remind people of their humanity, but their shared humanity. And that shared humanity has to cut across political beliefs if we are going to survive.” Perhaps no sentence sums up more succinctly what actor/writer/director Tim Robbins want to make clear with The Actors’ Gang production of We Live On which was adapted from Studs Terkel’s 1970 book Hard Times.

As in the book on which it is based, We Live On is an oral history of people who made it through the Great Depression. As adapted and performed by The Actors’ Gang company, selected stories from Hard Times are presented from the third person perspective. This is not a truly documentary approach where each actor depicts the story they are telling and in some cases they are telling stories from their own families.

It is a monumental work in three parts – each of which lasts approximately 80 minutes – that is being presented online. The first part premieres on Thursday, July 29th with the subsequent two parts premiering on Friday, July 30th and Saturday, July 31st.

What follows are excerpts from a phone conversation I had with Robbins last week that have been edited for length and clarity.

In Hard Times Studs Terkel said, “It’s very important we learn people as people are.” Is there one fundamental truth you’ve learned about people through the creation of We Live On?

Yes, I guess the thing that struck me the most about this story is the importance of the resilience, the courage and the tenacity it takes to survive through a catastrophe, a social upheaval. What Stud Terkel’s stories provided was a verité, a truth, a lived experience. These are real people. It’s not famous people. It’s people who struggled through this thing and made it.

Does a work like this remind us what happens when we don’t have personal connections? When we are kept in isolation from one another? Is that what makes it topical as we inch our way out of the pandemic?

That’s at the core of it. It’s all about that. That is something we’ve been working on for years at the Gang – how do we do work that matters to the audiences we’re speaking to. You add into that with what’s been happening over the past 10-15 years with people becoming more and more obsessed with their phones and more and more distracted from actual human contact.

After our first workshop performance, we did a talkback. I’m looking at the amount of people who have come to join us. My first fear was people are so burned out by Zoom, how are they going to hang in for 1 hour and 20 minutes. The number didn’t reduce. Everybody stayed and they stayed for another one-and-a-half hours and didn’t drop off. People stuck in for the whole thing. That made me realize that human connection is essential and has been missing and missing from theater and missing from films.

Terkel once said, “I’ve always felt, in all my books, that there’s a deep decency in the American people and a native intelligence – providing they have the facts, providing they have the information.” Even with information, this is a deeply divided country. Is his view no longer an accurate depiction of the American people?

I believe it is accurate still. I don’t know that we have all the facts and all the information. I don’t know that we have a well-informed and educated populace in this country. Particularly in terms of the arts. Certainly the marketplace doesn’t help with that at all. We’ve seen the movie industry lose all interest in creating dramas that matter like they used to in the 70s and 80s. The idea that we are storytellers and we have a kind of responsibility to tell varied stories.

I think when you tell a human story that might illuminate some truth that’s humanity. That’s what we’re in for. If you go back to the roots of it all and look how theater began…it was all centered around the big questions about man, hubris, gods and morality and what happens when you make decisions in your own life that go against the lessons that we’ve learned and what is the cost of that. The big questions.

And the more we remove from thinking the more we remove ourselves from feeling.

It’s why I wanted to do this material. We can’t be marginalizing people and telling them to shut up or that they are not worth anything because they disagree with us. This is what social media has accelerated. This idea that if you don’t agree with me I’ll cancel your ass. This is not a healthy environment to be in. Even if you disagree with someone they are still a person. Families are being divided. This is not the future we want.

When we are looking at a piece we want to do we have to understand we can’t do a litmus test on our audiences. We don’t ask people when they buy tickets to come see a show what their political beliefs are, what their health beliefs are, what they feel about this or that. We want people to share something on a communal space where they can all be reminded that despite their differences there is something that they share and it’s the human heart. That’s what Studs was talking about. That inherent goodness as people.

Haven’t we gotten very far from that ideal?

When you see division happening in a culture you can safely assume that there are those in power that would like to see you divided. As long as you are divided they can stay in power. It’s been that way from time immemorial. You go into an area and figure out how to create factionalism, they are not going to unite to kick you out. It’s the same in the United States on both sides.

So the recent revelation that a 1972 study from MIT predicted the fall of society in 2040 doesn’t surprise you?

It might happen sooner.

Not if the performing arts has anything to say about it.

That’s the whole point of what we do. I do not believe in any kind of exclusion at this point. You cannot have a cultural division going into the door. You just can’t. Let’s hope we get to a saner place with all of us. What we really need when we gather in a group, in an audience, in a concert venue, we need to have trust. And we need to have trust both ways that we all care about each other enough that we will take care of each other.

Photos of Tim Robbins courtesy The Actors’ Gang Facebook page

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“I immediately thought of this play I had written already, but it was originally a one-man piece,” Bane said by phone recently. “But being a new member of The Actors’ Gang, I didn’t want to not submit something. I wanted to show that I’m active and trying to participate. I should just send it and see if he likes or not. I was very fortunate that he did.”

In James’ Play, Bane tackles the subject of suicide. It’s something with which he’s sadly all too familiar. The former Marine’s father killed himself in March of 2011.

“When my dad committed suicide I found out his father had also committed suicide,” Bane revealed. “I’m James Edward Bane III and I found out my grandfather, James Edward Bane, who was a World War II veteran, killed himself as well. That might be a pattern. Maybe not. But I can’t ignore it. Unfortunately right after I first performed this solo piece, my best friend Brad, who was a Marine, took his own life in December of 2011.”

Fortunately Bane had a support system he could lean on while he was enrolled at USC getting his MFA in Theatre.

“It’s a lot like a family. I had this incredible instructor, Luis Alfaro [playwright: Oedipus El Rey, Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles] and he encouraged us to write the story we have to write. At the time I was dealing with my father’s suicide, but trying not to dwell on it. But part of the healing process was to explore it creatively for me.”

Visions of being an actor were in his mind during the last years of his time in the Marines. When self-doubt reared its ugly head, Bane got a major reality check. “I was in Washington, D.C. working with injured guys back from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and you would see them come to terms with their injuries and disabilities. I remember being up there and being asked what I wanted to do and I said ‘I don’t know if I could do this.’ And I was saying it to a kid without legs who said he was going to do a marathon. I couldn’t believe I was saying this to him. It’s really my attitude: if I want to be defeated by this I’m going to be. If I want to grow past this, I can, too.”

When Bane found himself accepted into The Actors’ Gang, nobody was as surprised as he was. “I got into acting thinking about being a movie star, not an artist,” he offered. “Now I know it’s so much more than that. I never thought I’d write anything. How did I get to be in the company of so many talented and hardworking actors who want to bring something to life? It’s really hard to describe at times.”

Now that he’s there, he has high hopes for what James’ Play can accomplish. “My goal is twofold. One is to help me deal with my crap. But also I really hope, and this is the bigger thing, I hope it gives a voice to someone else’s feelings if they are thinking about hurting themselves. Knowing they aren’t alone or seeing the effect it has on loved one. If it gives them a pause for a second longer, that’s really my hope.”

And if his dad or his buddy Brad had a chance to see the play, what would he like their reaction to be? “I would want them to be proud of my work; proud of me for pursuing this dream. And in all honesty, I would like for them to tell me it’s okay for me to use their stories. I still have a problem with that. I don’t know if it is survivor’s guilt, but part of me feels guilty for using part of their story even though I’m a part of it.”

Main Image by Ashley Randall/Courtesy of The Actors’ Gang

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Antonio Sanchez performs his Birdman score – Royce Hall/UCLA

February 16

Though his remarkable score for the Oscar-winning film Birdman was ruled ineligible for an Oscar nomination (due to the amount of source music also used in the film), it stood out as a remarkable and unique composition.  Antonio Sanchez, the man who wrote and performed the score, will be playing the score live while the film is projected. Unlike most live music to film presentations that are currently in vogue, his performance is not a note-for-note replication. As it is more jazz-like in construct, it will be his improvisation on what he did for the film. If you want to see what Sanchez has to say about the score now and how he tackles these live concerts, check out my interview with him here.  Also, he is performing with his band, Migration, on Saturday night at the Theatre at the Ace Hotel. They will be performing his Meridian Suite album in its entirety.

Salonen: Wing on Wing – Walt Disney Concert Hall

February 16-18

Fresh off last week’s four concerts featuring Esa-Pekka Salonen’s three concerti (for cello, piano and violin, respectively), is another round of concerts. These three  performances include Beethoven’s Violin Concerto (performed by Vilde Frang), Mozart’s The Impresario and Salonen’s Wing on Wing. It was for the opening of Walt Disney Concert Hall that Salonen composed the work. Frank Gehry’s architecture inspired the work and celebrated the realization of the concert hall.

Priscilla Queen of the Desert – Celebration Theatre

Opens February 17

In 2016, Celebration Theatre did what seemed outright impossible. They put on a production of one of the biggest, splashiest musicals Broadway had ever seen, The Boy From Oz, in their small theatre in Hollywood. It was a smash success, was highly-acclaimed and won several awards.  If at first you do succeed, try it again. And they are – with another big splashy musical (so big it played the Palace Theatre on Broadway): Priscilla Queen of the Desert. Based on the film of the same name, the show tells the story of two drag queens and a transgender colleague on a road trip across Australia. There is a secret reason for the road trip that threatens the relationship the three share. Amongst the songs featured in the show are such disco classics (no, that’s not an oxymoron) as “Don’t Leave Me This Way,” “I Will Survive,” “Shake Your Groove Thing” and “Hot Stuff.”

The Unauthorized Musical Parody of Jurassic Park – Rockwell Table & Stage

Now playing

When the UMPO series did musical parodies of films like The Devil Wears Prada and Home Alone, it was pretty easy to visualize what they might do. With their new show, poking fun at Stephen Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, I just wonder how many dinosaurs get songs and what they would be? Of course, the characters played by Jeff Goldblum (who makes regular appearances at Rockwell), Laura Dern and Sir Richard Attenborough at the ones most likely to break into song. But wouldn’t you love to hear a T-Rex do “Children of the Revolution” or “Bang a Gong?”

The New Colossus – The Actors’ Gang

Now playing

In light of the tragedy that occurred this week in Florida, perhaps there’s no better time to be asking the question, “Who are we as a nation?” The Actors’ Gang Ensemble and Tim Robbins put together The New Colossus, to ask that question, but as it pertains to immigration. By telling the stories of their own ancestors in a variety of languages, eras and with the incorporation of poetry, music and movement, this show not only asks the question above, but also reminds us that we are, and have always been, a nation of immigrants.

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