Ready to see the Actors’ Gang carry out Dario Fo’s “Can’t Pay? Don’t Pay!” in Culver Metropolis on a balmy night in March 2022 feels a bit like residing a fairy story: particularly, “Sleeping Magnificence.” The half the place the dominion wakes up from its cursed slumber and resumes life as if no time has handed in any respect.

Again in March 2020, “Can’t Pay? Don’t Pay!” was only some weeks into its run when the pandemic shut it down. Precisely two years later to the day, the present reopened.

It’s not as if these behind the play spent these years in suspended animation, simply ready for the spell to be lifted. The forged and crew labored on different initiatives (a number of on Zoom). However most of them occurred to be obtainable when the Actors’ Gang determined to remount “Can’t Pay? Don’t Pay!” as its first post-pandemic, in-person manufacturing.

There are a few completely different faces within the forged. And the set isn’t precisely the identical. The director, Bob Turton, initially staged the present within the spherical. “I used to be like, ‘The viewers can be proper on high of you! It’s gonna be so actual!’” he recollects, laughing. “After which COVID occurred and I used to be like, ‘Oh, God. We’ve to place ‘em again within the viewers, and we’ve got to create an precise set.’”

So it’s not as if all the pieces stayed the identical. Nevertheless it nonetheless feels as if we’ve simply woken up from a protracted, involuntary nap. It’s all a bit surreal. Like when Tim Robbins, inventive director of the Actors’ Gang — additionally an Oscar-winning actor, to not point out a director, author and musician — emerges out of the Culver Metropolis darkness and strolls into the historic Ivy Substation, the previous energy station for L.A.’s defunct trolley system that has housed the corporate since 2005. After which, whenever you observe him in, you might be advised you don’t must put on a masks or present proof of vaccination. This coverage is consistent with the most recent L.A. County suggestions, however strolling right into a room with a naked face nonetheless feels subversive, even dangerous. (You might be welcome to put on a masks if you need.)

One other factor takes a little bit of getting used to, possibly particularly after two years of watching small screens in lockdown, is the Actors’ Gang’s distinctive strategy to efficiency, typically referred to easily as “The Fashion.” It’s, nicely, stylized: theatrical, massive, loud and mannered.

“The Fashion,” Robbins tells me just a few days later in a Zoom interview, emerged in deliberate opposition to kitchen-sink realism. Robbins co-founded the Actors’ Gang in 1981 with what he describes as “a bunch of punk rockers out of UCLA who noticed theater differently than folks within the theater division noticed it.” Not that they have been outcasts there, he provides. They’d sympathetic academics. “It was extra that once they taught us the teachings about German expressionism and absurdism and even early realism, we understood that that core was one thing that was lacking from the present state of American realism.

“I’ve by no means considered theater as possessing a fourth wall,” he continues. “That you simply’re similar to observers of human conduct in some type of human zoo. I didn’t purchase that. As a result of it’s denying an apparent actuality. There are folks there which have come to see a present, and there are folks there which have come to do the present for them.”

In different phrases, the viewers is a vital ingredient of the equation. That’s one purpose the Actors’ Gang didn’t reopen final fall, when another theaters resumed programming; there have been nonetheless too many restrictions. “That’s a pact we’ve got with our viewers. We will’t violate that pact. We thought, we’re going to attend till all of us can come,” says Robbins.

In 1984, Robbins and the Gang took a workshop with the actor Georges Bigot, of the French firm Théâtre du Soleil, which was visiting L.A. for the Olympic Arts Competition. The avant-garde ensemble, created by Ariane Mnouchkine, labored within the Italian commedia dell’arte custom, utilizing inventory characters and masks. “There was one thing about the best way they approached theater that was ritualistic,” says Robbins, “acknowledging of the viewers, not afraid to be telling giant tales about man and energy and God and people sorts of giant tales.”

“The Fashion” has not all the time been everyone’s cup of tea, and the Gang has persistently gravitated towards eclectic, extremely political materials that doesn’t essentially rope within the lots. Dario Fo, an Italian playwright who died in 2016, is true up that alley. When Fo gained the Nobel Prize for literature in 1997, the Nobel Committee praised him for “emulating the jesters of the Center Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden.” “Can’t Pay? Don’t Pay!” is considered one of Fo’s most produced works.

Set and first carried out in 1974 in Milan (this translation, by Actors’ Gang member Cam Deaver, relocates the motion to present-day U.S.), it begins within the wake of a protest at a grocery store. Fed up with skyrocketing costs, girls have resorted to looting. Our heroine, Antonia (Kaili Hollister), absconds with a lot stolen meals that she asks her neighbor, Margarita (Lynde Houck), to assist haul the baggage into her condominium. However the place to cover them? Not solely are the ladies’s law-abiding husbands, Giovanni (Jeremie Loncka) and Luigi (Luis Quintana), due residence from work, however the police and the FBI (each teams performed by Steven M. Porter and Stephanie G. Galindo) are additionally looking out door to door for suspicious groceries.

Pondering quick, Antonia and Margarita dangle baggage round their necks and button up their coats over them. Now all they’ve to clarify is how they’re all of the sudden 9 months’ pregnant.

The evening I used to be there, after just a few beats of surprised silence, the viewers was overcome by a type of helplessness wherein actually something might set us off. We even chuckled when the characters interrupted the motion with lengthy denunciations of the corruption inherent in banking.

“That’s one of many challenges of Dario Fo,” concedes director Turton, who starred within the Gang’s 2019 manufacturing of Fo’s “Unintended Dying of an Anarchist” earlier than venturing into directing. “These performs are so hilarious and so enjoyable and so humorous, however they’re political, and there’s normally like a factor on the finish which is like, ‘And now the entire level of all the pieces!’ We struggled with: What’s that line between making the purpose and honoring the author but additionally not preaching to the viewers an excessive amount of?’”

For Robbins, the combination of comedy and politics is the entire level. “If you wish to do theater about stuff that issues, discover a method to make it humorous,” he says. When he first learn Fo, again at UCLA, he recollects, “I used to be already predisposed to theater that requested questions, that attempted to handle the society that we’re residing in. However I had by no means seen it actually be humorous.” It was due to Fo that Robbins took a playwriting class and started to put in writing for the stage himself. “So in a method, Dario’s type of the bottom zero of inspiration for me wanting to put in writing and create theater.”

The Actors’ Gang didn’t do any Fo performs till “Unintended Dying,” after a few of them had met Fo himself. In 2014, their manufacturing of “A Midsummer Evening’s Dream” was visiting Milan, Fo’s hometown. Robbins invited Fo to see the present, and he accepted. Forged member Turton remembers Robbins popping in backstage to say, “‘OK, everyone, don’t freak out, however Dario Fo’s coming to the present tonight.’ We’re like, ‘What?’”

On the curtain name, Fo was the primary one on his toes, cheering. He visited the forged backstage and praised them in Italian. He painted a portray for them and wrote them a letter. The letter, says Robbins, “was mainly affirming the work that I and the Actors’ Gang had been doing for the previous, at that time, 35 years, and it was an acknowledgement that what we have been doing was the magic of theater.”

Robbins and Fo struck up a friendship that lasted till Fo’s loss of life in 2016; it additionally impressed the Gang to do some Fo performs. After the success of “Unintended Dying,” Robbins determined to tackle “Can’t Pay? Don’t Pay!” subsequent. Alongside the best way, he persuaded Turton to strive his hand at directing.

Turton remembers this pivotal dialog with an air of bemusement. “Tim got here to me and stated, ‘Hey, do you wish to direct?’ And I used to be like, ‘No. I don’t wish to direct. I don’t know find out how to direct.’”

“Can’t Pay? Don’t Pay!” is Turton’s second directorial effort, after 2019’s revival of Robbins’ 1986 play “Violence: The Misadventures of Spike Spangle.” So he should like directing, regardless of his enduring shock at discovering himself doing it in any respect. “I feel Tim noticed one thing in me,” Turton says. “That he thought I might get pleasure from it, or that I might be good at it, and he was completely proper.”

Requested what he noticed in Turton, Robbins cocks his head. “He’s actor. It’s in conversations that I’ve had with him concerning the work that we’re doing. A few willingness to have humility when he approached directing for the primary time. That was what bought me.”

Anyway, Robbins likes to advertise from inside the firm, he says. “I’ve introduced a few administrators up that method. They already know the vocabulary, and it’s extra sustainable. My ambition is that there can be 5, six stable administrators that can take this into the following 20 years. As a result of I can’t do that without end. I’ve finished it for 40 years. In some unspecified time in the future I’ve to transition right into a lesser function within the firm. If not just a few type of, like, plaque on the wall.”

How a couple of statue within the courtyard?

“I feel that’s a bit an excessive amount of,” Robbins demurs, conceding after a beat, “Perhaps a bust.”