From that experience Gordin has developed a great relationship with Heggie. When he was looking for a unique way of re-launching programming at Festival Opera, he turned to Heggie’s work.

“We have this tradition of producing the sort of standard repertoire and we’ve had a commitment to developing some new works and presenting good works of American composers. We’ve had Jake’s work performed before. So he’s certainly not new to our audience and not new to the Bay Area.”

On Friday and Sunday, Festival Opera will present A Jake Heggie Triptych that will feature three of the composer’s works: At the Statue of Venus, Camille Claudel: Into the Fire and For a Look or a Touch.

Last month I spoke with Gordin about Heggie, the character he’ll be singing in For a Look or a Touch and the battles he’s faced in his life. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity.

If you go to Jake Heggie’s website there are ten pages of compositions he’s written – most of which the world doesn’t know. So when you have such a broad menu of pieces from which you can choose, how and why did you choose these three?

I heard For a Look or a Touch initially when the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus produced it. It must have been seven or so years ago. And it was moving. I saw that there were other versions of it that had been developed. So I was intrigued.

I didn’t do any more than that until Jake reached out to me to cover the role of Manfred in it. Into the Fire had been staged by a dear friend, Diana Tash, who’s actually doing it in our production. And I thought, why don’t we give that a full theatrical production with our resources. So there was that piece of it. And then I was familiar with At the Statue of Venus from seeing it on YouTube. And so I thought, what’s the heartbeat of these three pieces and it boils down to love. So they are thematically joined by this human desire for love, acceptance and being seen. That’s how they came be this triptych.

When I read the libretto for For a Look or a Touch, I was reminded of a scene in Martin Sherman’s play Bent. [Heggie’s work is based on the true story of Gad Beck and Manfred Lewin, two men whose relationship in Germany during World War II lead to acts of bravery and the execution of Lewin at Auschwitz.] How do the arts allow for a more public expression of ideas that aren’t always common seen or shared elsewhere?

I think it’s the job of artists, and certainly in my position here, to create experiences for people to come together and relate to each other. As far as different kinds of relationships, it’s important to portray the humanity in those relationships and give people the opportunity to experience that.

I’m assuming you didn’t grow up seeing work like this on a regular basis. As a gay man, what priority are you putting on telling gay stories and/or supporting other gay artists like Jake?

I think that there is a deeper integrity when the people in the work are sharing a lived experience. From my perspective I have gone through my own journey of being brought up as a Mormon boy and coming out and having all sorts of rejection and having to rebuild community. So there were certainly moments in the story that I could relate to. And I think that’s an important element. I’ve seen lots of white, Christian, very straight people playing roles that are really not in their lived experience and it provides a different lens that provides maybe a bit of detachment that is not interesting to me.

Isn’t the whole idea of being an artist to be able to enter into these worlds and bring them to life? Either through research, their own experience or through some amalgamation of both to create a character? At the risk of being absurd, should serial killers only be able to portray serial killers?

Well that’s a bit of a leap. I think it’s all an individual perspective. Any artist, especially in opera, is going to have an opportunity to play roles and to take part in stories that have nothing to do with them. My point here is that we’re lucky to get the people involved who have had their own experiences to bring to the table in their storytelling.

Gad Beck gave an interview where he said, “Look, if I am a hero, I am a little one. Everyone has to fight sometime in their life.” How and when have you had to fight the most?

I grew up in an extremely abusive home. As a child I was subjected to a lot of physical abuse and just surviving through that I had to fight. I certainly had to fight coming to terms with myself. Now as an impresario, an advocate for the opera company, I fight for my artists and I fight to keep this company alive. It’s definitely requiring us to dig deep.

There’s a line that Manfred sings in For a Look or a Touch [the libretto is by Gene Scheer] when he sings, “I hear a voice that ends all doubt.” Do you have that one voice that ends all doubt for you?

I think the closest thing I have to it is nature. The peace that I see and feel when I’m surrounded by a group of redwood trees or I’m looking out on the ocean and I am just part of something that is so much larger than me that there’s no room for anything else but that awareness.

Does that help you conquer the doubt being in that space?

It certainly helps me dissociate. I certainly suffer from a version of perfectionism and I think it has to be tempered with a kind of being able to put that away so that whatever mastery or whatever you have within you can come out.

And the interesting thing is that truth is often changing.

Absolutely. I think that’s part of growing as a being. Like your awareness and your consciousness hopefully shift and your opinions get revised and your life experience brings to you things that change you. And that’s all important.

For tickets for the Friday performance, please go here. For tickets for the Sunday performance, please go here.

Photo of Zachary Gordin by Bradford Rogne/Courtesy Festival Opera

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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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Tim Robbins, artistic director of The Actors’ Gang, says he was surprised by how much writing talent there was in the company. “I had no idea we had such talented playwrights within the company,” he says in the press release. “What was doubly impressive though, was how much the plays had in common: themes of life and death, judgment and the afterlife, the anxiety and struggle of everyday survival…”

The Actors’ Gang has always been a progressive, thinking-person’s kind of theatre and Angels, Devils and Other Things seems to be right in line with their record of thought-provoking entertainment.

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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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