TOPSY TURVY, ARREST THE CLOWNS Included in 2025-2026 Season at The Actors' Gang

The Actors’ Gang is announcing its full 2025/2026 which features seven original plays, two twentieth century theatrical classics, and Late Night Fridays that will present improvised commedia dell’ arte, live music and film screenings. The season begins with the return of The Actors’ Gang’s most recent hit, Topsy Turvy (A Musical Greek Vaudeville), written and directed by Tim Robbins, from September 18 to 27, prior to going out on tour in the U.S.
 
Season passholders save 30% - see all shows for as little as $25 per show.  Season passes for the seven show season are now on sale at theactorsgang.com or by phone at 310-838-4264.  The Actors’ Gang Theater is at  9070 Venice Blvd., Culver City, CA 90232. Senior and student passes are also available.
 
Topsy Turvy (A Musical Greek Vaudeville), one of the largest hits of recent Actors’ Gang history, addresses topics making the headlines every day. Robbins wrote the play in response to the last six years.  Set in a humorous and comedic hybrid world of classical Greek theater and a raucous vaudeville show, everyone - Gods and mortals alike - gets to have their say before the evening is over.  
 
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. Topsy Turvy has six original songs written by Robbins, brought to life by a small orchestra of musicians and the choral harmonies of fifteen actors.
 
The second show, Arrest the Clowns – Insolent until proven guilty, directed by Chas Harvey, had a development production at The Actors’ Gang last spring.  In the show (October 30 to November 15) written by Clown Pit Revolution, intelligence sources from F.I.N.C.T.E.R. (Federal Investigation Network (to) Control Thought (and) Egalitarian RiffRaff) report that an underground criminal organization of anarchist clowns has conspired to lay siege to a theatre in Culver City.  This rebel demonstration will be the perfect opportunity for our agency to intercept their insurgency and Arrest the Clowns. 
 
A newly developed family Holiday Show continues the ongoing The Actors’ Gang spirit (December 4 to 20). Directed by Adam Dugas, and written by Mary Eileen O’Donnell and Dugas, the holiday show will conjure up a magical wintery world with an original tale that features music, puppetry, and theatrical wonderment.  A kaleidoscopic journey will grab our hearts and fill our cups with a seasonal picaresque in The Actors’ Gang style.
 
Three original one acts written and directed by Actors’ Gang members are presented in More Miracles, January 22 to February 21, 2026.  The plays were developed by The Actors’ Gang during the 2025 10-minute play festival, Night Miracles: Nun Fight written and directed by Willa Fossum; Sixteen Summers, written by Ayinde Howell and directed by Gloria Briseno; and In Recovery, written by Mary Eileen O’Donnell and directed by VJ Foster.
 
The Actors’ Gang then presents a new production of Elmer Rice’s 1923 The Adding Machine (March 5 to April 18, 2026) directed by Cihan Sahin.  The play is a visionary classic that warns of and satirizes the future we find ourselves currently living in. 
 
The central character, Mr. Zero, an oppressed and abused ‘wage-slave,’ has been fired after a quarter century of loyal service as a bookkeeper.  He has been replaced by an adding machine.  Zero snaps and murders his boss; then tried, found guilty, and executed. Act two finds him in the stand-in for Heaven, Elysian Fields, where he operates an even larger computer (with his big toe), recording the output of downtrodden miners – until he is told that he is a waste of space and sent back to Earth for re-use.
 
Michael Billington in The Guardian said, “Rice's play has left its impact on a wide variety of works, from Chaplin's Modern Times to Tony Kushner's Angels in America. But what is striking is the bilious inclusiveness of its attack on a machine-driven society that not only exploits its workers but robs them of their souls. Mr. Zero and his neighbors are all rancidly xenophobic, and, when the hero is offered a place in the Elysian Fields, he flees in horror from a paradise filled with art, music, and love.”
 
Next up is Fractured Fables (April 25 to May 30), a new theatrical adaptation of fairy tales from Aesop to Grimm to Hans Christian Andersen, Directed by Adam J. Jefferis, this original piece draws inspiration from story theater, popular culture and rock and roll and promises to be fun for the entire family.

The Physicists, a darkly comic morality play about science by Frederich Dürrenmatt and directed by Brent Hinkley, closes the season (May 7 to June 20). Influenced by Bertolt Brecht, Dürrenmat was one of the most important playwrights in the aftermath of World War II. His biographer Ernst Pawel wrote that he took "a glum view not only of his fellow Swiss but also of the world at large, and much of his prolific output sounds apocalyptic notes modulated by elegant irony. In Durrenmatt's universe, God is not dead but has withdrawn from mankind, and His supreme indifference is manifest in the universal absence of justice." 
 
In a 1970 interview with The Christian Science Monitor, Dürrenmatt said that the most important task of theater is to show the audience their own “foolishness, blindness, and lack of judgment. He must see in the heroes of the play that his own behavior is often wrong."  In Dürrenmatt’s well-known The Visit, a poverty stricken town welcomes its richest emigree until they learn she wants the citizens to murder a fellow townsman who seduced her and then denied being the father of their child. The New York Times said, “Everything has its price.  Put the price high enough and society can find a way to make murder moral.”
 
In 1964, the first Broadway production of The Physicists was directed by Peter Brook. Times critic Howard Taubman wrote, "Have the warnings of the atomic scientists in their bulletins and speeches become too commonplace for notice?  Listen to the bitter thesis in Friedrich Dürrenmatt's unsparing parable on the pass to which this radioactive planet has been brought.”
 
In the play, the world’s greatest physicist, Johann Wilhelm Möbius, haunted by King Solomon,  is in an asylum befriended by two equally deluded scientists – one who believes he is Einstein and the other Newton.  They are not as harmless as they appear as they plot the end of the world abetted by their psychiatrist, Mathilde von Zahnd.  Like Peter Weiss’ Marat/Sade, also originally directed by Peter Brook, The Physicists asks where mad and dangerously insane begin?
 
Samuel Matlack in The New Atlantis said, The Physicists is “one of the most-performed dramas over the last half century. The play touches on many themes that were of importance to postwar World War II audiences, including institutional psychiatry and the way society deals with madness. But the play is most compelling because it raises questions of lasting importance — matters of science, ethics, and responsibility. With eloquent brevity, Dürrenmatt’s play reveals the paradox of the twentieth century: at the supposed apex of reason and science, and under the banner of scientific and social progress, man became guilty of some of the most barbaric atrocities ever committed … The Physicists casts crippling doubt on the likelihood that either scientists or politicians would responsibly wield the power of science.”
 
The Actors’ Gang has even more new programming: to ring in the new year, beginning in January 2026, TAG presents Late Night Fridays curated from Commedia Palooza, Clown Pit Revolution, Oz Side of the Moon, and the Vanguard Project.  The evenings include Live Music and film screenings
 
Summer – August 1 to 23, 2026, includes the annual Shakespeare in the Park for Families – a Bard mash-up -- performed for kids, their parents, and children of all ages. Directed by Adam J. Jefferis, the admission is free for all and entertains for four magical weekends.