Tonya Mosley
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
But why did the cynicism need to happen a few years later with the no after this big declarative yes?
Tessa Thompson stars in the new Netflix series His and Hers.
She's nominated for Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture Drama for her role in the film Hedda.
If you'd like to catch up on interviews you've missed, like our conversation with journalist Jacob Soboroff about his new book, Firestorm, which is about last year's devastating Los Angeles wildfires, or New Yorker staff writer Charles Bethea on the political transformation of Marjorie Taylor Greene,
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This is Fresh Air.
And my guest today is Tim Robbins, Academy Award-winning actor, director, and founder of The Actors Gang, a theater company he started in Los Angeles back in 1981 with a group of fellow UCLA students.
We sat down in October in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, after a live performance of his new play, Topsy Turvy, at the Kohler Art Center.
Sheboygan itself is a small lakeside city right next to Kohler, a place with a rich art scene.
The performance was part of the city's first film festival, which wrapped with a 30th anniversary screening of Dead Man Walking, the second film Robbins directed.
Topsy Turvy is about a chorus that's lost its ability to sing together after the pandemic's long isolation, a metaphor that hits uncomfortably close to home for many.
And in a way, it connects to what Robbins has explored for more than 40 years, impossible reconciliations between people with opposing beliefs, between guilt and redemption, between isolation and connection.
From the Shawshank Redemption to Bob Roberts to his prison theater work with the Actors Gang, he circles around one question.
How do we find harmony when we've forgotten how to listen?
Robbins and I talked about why he's taking an experimental play on the road instead of making another prestige TV show.
And I asked him about how the COVID lockdown and the isolation that followed affected him.