This Saturday, Academy Award winning actor Tim Robbins and members of The Actors' Gang head for the sunny California coastal hamlet of Blue Lake, home of Dell'Arte International, to receive the "Prize of Hope". The Prize of Hope is an international award established by Denmark's Institute for Popular Theatre that is given to a person or theater "who has worked for human hope in a daring, loving, vulgar, serious, poetic manner with sparkling energy" and is given to "those who encourage people to use their own eyes, ears and voice."
Robbins, along with Actors' Gang founding member Cynthia Ettinger; director of education Vanessa Mizzone; and The Gang's Summer Family Theater Initiative director Justin Zsebe, will be on hand to accept the Prize of Hope from Dell'Arte International's producing artistic director, Michael Fields, at the opening of the annual Mad River Festival on June 21. Dell'Arte was the first organization in the U.S. to be awarded the Prize of Hope in 2005.
Denmark's Institute for Popular Theatre established the Prize of Hope in 1987 to recognize live theater as a popular and accessible art form and work against the role of art as passive consumerism. Today, the Institute for Popular Theatre has more than 30 theaters and 100 individuals as members throughout Scandinavia.
"The Actors' Gang is the embodiment of the intent and spirit of the Prize of Hope," said Fields. "We considered many theater artists and companies working in the United States today, but it was the powerful combination of contemporary immediacy, public engagement and great theatrical craft created with a profound hope for changing the course of life for the better that made The Actors' Gang the clear choice."
The Actors' Gang, now in its 25th season of rule-breaking, thought-provoking, engaging theater, is one of Los Angeles' most enduring ensembles. Since its founding in 1982, The Gang has consistently won acclaim for its daring interpretations of Shakespeare, Buchner, Brecht, Moliere, Aeschylus, Ibsen and Chekhov, while also developing daring new plays that address today's world through a prism of satire, popular culture, and raucous stagecraft. "Of the theater companies in Los Angeles that doggedly dare to dissect current political conflicts, The Actors' Gang, headed by Oscar-winning actor Tim Robbins, is the most prominent," wrote The Daily Breeze.
