A HEALING GANG

Actor Tim Robbins finds his greatest personal and professional fulfillment in four decades of his theater troupe's prison work

- BY H. ALAN SCOTT

SAFE SPACE Since Robbins co-founded The Actors' Gang in 1981, it has nourished him as much as the nonprofit's clients.

SAY THE NAME TIM ROBBINS, AND WHAT COMES TO MIND IS likely his performance as convicted murderer Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption or his Oscar-winning turn as Dave in the murder mystery Mystic River. In many respects it’s fitting that two of his most memorable roles involve men in legal peril, because outside of Hollywood, Robbins has committed his life’s work to bringing the arts to the less fortunate—and particularly the incarcerated—with his theater group The Actors’ Gang.

“It’s central to who I am and why I feel I’ve been able to survive in an industry that’s pretty brutal,” Robbins told Newsweek. “I have a consistency that has fed my heart and soul, for [about] the last 44 years. It is where I can continue to grow as a writer, as an actor, as a director and as a person. The thing I love about theater, and the reason I continue to do it, is because it is a medium that will never be locked, it will always be amorphous and changing.”

The group’s official mission is to “restore the ancient sense of the stage as a shared sacred space, to introduce theater to children and help them find their own creative voices, to bring the freedom of self-expression to the incarcerated.”

In many respects, the key to understanding the roles Robbins is best known for lies with much of the work he’s done with the acting group, where he serves as artistic director. By bringing theater to people who often can’t access it, Robbins’ life mission is to show how theater can be a tool to help people become more humane.

Forging an Artistic Home