A Los Angeles gang will bring a dark element to the Washington Center Friday. One of L.A.’s best gangs, too. The famed Los Angeles theater ensemble The Actors’ Gang, presents another in its series of “re-interpretations” of classic stories. This time, the material is drawn from George Orwell’s novel of a dark human future, 1984. (Think “Big Brother” is watching.) The production is directed by Actors’ Gang founder and current artistic director, actor Tim Robbins (The Shawshank Redemption, The Player).
“Tim is great to work with,” says Cameron Dye, who plays Winston Smith, the character through whose eyes the world of 1984 is seen. Dye explains that Robbins began his career doing street theater, a venue often used as a vehicle to “provoke thought.” Robbins continues “using theater as a social force,” Dye says, “but there’s always a lot of laughter.”
Not that 1984 is a comedy. Far from it, in fact. Still, Dye points out, 1984’s audiences are given “an occasional breather … a chuckle.”
The Actors’ Gang has itself been around since the 1980s, often staging original versions of classic works — William Shakespeare among them. Many of the company’s plays are staged in a broad style that tends to do away with the “fourth wall” that usually isolates the players from the audience.
“It makes our productions very immediate,” Dye says. 1984, on the other hand, is staged in a generally more realistic style, he adds, “but it’s still very immediate.
“And that’s the experience you hope to have,” Dye says, “that connection with the audience … to have them feel like they are participating with you.”
Cameron Dye, who is also a singer/songwriter, and who may be familiar to filmgoers and television viewers from his numerous appearances, was himself an original Gang member. “And I’ve come back into the fold more actively in the last four to five years,” he explains.
“You always want to stay rooted in the theater,” Dye says. “It feeds your soul. It’s always the thing that you come back to … where you can connect with the audience.”
1984 is set in a “dystopian” (the opposite of utopian) future where two-way televisions monitor everyone’s movements and words 24 hours a day. And what the television monitors don’t catch, the legions of informants do. The Actors’ Gang version, adapted by Michael Gene Sullivan, picks up after the Winston Smith character, a regime bureaucrat, has been arrested and is undergoing interrogation. During the interrogation, the actors who share the stage with Dye reenact scenes from Winston Smith’s diary, while Smith watches.
“Tim has a very acute sense of what’s going on in the world,” Dye says of director Robbins. And 1984, like other productions in the Actors’ Gang repertoire, has to power to “provoke thought” in relation to the themes explored and issues raised in the play —issues involving the use of detention centers, the nature of patriotism, the imposition of limits on individual rights, etc. Audiences are thus encouraged to consider intangibles like individual freedom and freedom of thought — and to view them through the lens of a society that has taken such rights away.
“The play has been very successful,” Dye says of the current tour, now in its second year. “Michael Gene Sullivan, the adapter, wrote it with the intention that anyone (in any country) could do it.” The tour has taken the company to venues in Greece, Hong Kong and Australia. And no doubt it’s been “provoking thought” and stirring discussion in each of those places.
1984 is being presented in the Washington Center’s black box auditorium for one performance only.
[Washington Center for the Performing Arts, 1984, Friday, April 4, 7:30 p.m., $19.50-$39.50, 512 Washington St. S.E., Olympia, 360.753.8586, www.washingtoncenter.org]
