TOPSY TURVY Returns to the Actors' Gang This Month

The Actors’ Gang audience favorite Topsy Turvy (A Musical Greek Vaudeville), written and directed by Artistic Director Tim Robbins, will return for a limited engagement September 26th to November 16th; the press re-opening is October 4th & 5th. The production returns to Los Angeles after performances at the Sibiu International Theatre Festival in June, and the Malta Theater Festival in Poland and The Csokonai National Theater in Hungary in early September.
 
Tickets are available at www.theactorsgang.com and by phone at 310-838-4264. Pay-What-You-Can performances are on Thursday evenings, tickets available at the door.
 
Set in a humorous and comedic hybrid world of classical Greek theater and a raucous vaudeville show, in Topsy Turvy the unity of a Greek Chorus is shattered by a mysterious illness. The Chorus desperately invoke the Gods, seeking divine intervention to help mend their divisiveness and restore their ability to sing together.
 
There are visits from a Vegas inspired Bacchus and Cupid, the Aztec goddess Coatlique, the biblical character Onan, and Dionysus and Aphrodite. Mixed in with the Gods are magicians, hypnotists, an acrobatic monkey and the master of ceremonies, the Great Distracto. Music plays a key role in Topsy Turvy with six original songs written by Robbins, brought to life by a small orchestra of musicians and the choral harmonies of fifteen actors.
 
The result, Topsy Turvy, addresses topics making the headlines every day and is among the earliest stage works in response to the distress of the last four years. Everyone, Gods and mortals alike, gets to have their say before the evening is over.
 
Background -- The Actors’ Gang during the Pandemic
 
During the shutdown The Actors’ Gang kept all of its employees on salary and health insurance. The Gang adapted their outreach programs in schools and prisons to a virtual format and continued workshops with its actors online.
 
Robbins said, “But what was missing was what theater reliably provides: a place of gathering and community. The Gang could not meet in their shared space, their theater. For some, there was something tragic and wrong about the theater being closed, something ominous and unsettling about gathering places all around the world being shuttered. And when theaters were allowed to reopen there was something that didn’t feel right about only opening for some audience members and excluding others.”
 
Robbins continued, “I was thinking a lot about the Greek and Roman Gods during this time. What would Aphrodite feel about the divisiveness and the absence of love? What would Dionysus, the God of theater, think about forums and gathering places being shuttered, even in an emergency? I began writing Topsy Turvy as a response to the seeming disintegration of community and the widening chasms between all of us that were exacerbated by the lack of human contact during lockdown. This turmoil was indeed the stuff of Greek tragedy and comedy; big events that challenge society and the citizenry’s demand for answers from the Gods. Our job, as it always is at The Actors’ Gang when approaching stories relevant to the present, is to find the satirical humor and the musical truth that will make this an entertaining and illuminating experience for all, regardless of how one felt during this time.”
 
Robbins concluded, “We’ve all just lived through a big, dramatic life event and people responded in different ways. I traveled between one end and the other. The play is intended to be a catalyst for a conversation. It’s really about a society in chaos, a society that has lost its sense of up and down, a world gone topsy turvy. And in classic Greek plays, that is when the Chorus calls on the Gods for help.”
 
“We are living in an aftermath of disorder and disarray. Theater is here precisely for these times. It has the potential to unite us. It can inspire laughter, bring us songs that touch the heart, raise difficult questions and dichotomies, remind us of our shared humanity and perhaps if we do our job well, heal some divides."
 
Topsy Turvy is Robbins' fifteenth play. His first play, Inside Eddie Binstock was produced in 1982 at the Deja Vu Coffeehouse in Hollywood. At The Actors’ Gang In the 1980’s with Adam Simon, Robbins co wrote Alagazam, After the Dog Wars, Violence, the Misadventures of Spike Spangle Farmer, and Carnage, a Comedy which represented the United States in the 1989 Edinburgh International Festival and performed at The Public Theater in New York. His next play about Christopher Columbus, Mayhem, the Invasion, was performed on NPR on a national broadcast on October 12, 1992, the 500th Anniversary of Columbus’ landing in the New World. In 2003, Robbins’ satire of the Iraq War, Embedded, played at The Actors’ Gang Theater in Los Angeles, The Public Theater in NYC and the Riverside Theater in London, before touring throughout the United States. His play Harlequino: On to Freedom (2012) toured to Italy and China, and The New Colossus (2019) which he co-wrote with members of The Actors’ Gang, toured to Chile and Argentina before embarking on a U.S. tour. Other plays written by Robbins include Plastic Flowers, Wheels, Regarding Johnny, Out of Sight Out of Mind, and Break the Whip. As a screenwriter, Robbins’ credits include Bob Roberts (1992), Dead Man Walking (1996), and Cradle Will Rock (1999).
 

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