Hi, it's Carrie. Our co-host Tanya Mosley and I will be doing an end of the year Fresh Air Plus bonus episode answering listener questions about the show and about ourselves. You can send the questions now to Fresh Air Plus at NPR.org with Plus spelled out. That's Fresh Air Plus at NPR.org.

This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. And my guest today is Tim Robbins, Academy Award

winning actor, director, and founder of the actors gang, a theater company he started in Los

Angeles back in 1981 with a group of fellow UCLA students.

We sat down in October in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, after a live performance of his new play,

Topsy-Turvy, at the Kohler Art Center.

Sheboygan itself is a small lakeside city right next to Kohler, a place with a rich art scene.

The performance was part of the city's first film festival, which wrapped with a 30th anniversary

screening of Dead Man Walking, the second film Robbins directed.

Topsy Turvey is about a chorus that's lost its ability to sing together after the pandemic's long isolation, a metaphor that hits uncomfortably close to home for many.

And in a way, it connects to what Robbins has explored for more than 40 years, impossible reconciliations between people with opposing beliefs, between guilt and redemption, between isolation and connection.

From the Shawshank Redemption to Bob Roberts to his prison theater work with the actors gang, he circles around one question.

How do we find harmony when we've forgotten how to listen?

Robbins and I talked about why he's taking an experimental play on the road instead of making

another prestige TV show, and I asked him about how the COVID lockdown and the isolation

that followed affected him. Here's our conversation.

Well, in many ways, the lockdown was illuminating to me. Things that I had held sacred or had held as truths were challenged during that time. And what it made me do was it made me question myself and question

what my beliefs are. And I think that's a very healthy thing. As a writer, I need to do that all the time.

As an actor, I have to do that. So drama is about finding the complexities and the conflicts that we all have within ourselves.

I think that's the way to approach these discussions about society at large.

When you're dealing with them in a play or in a movie, you have to give respect

to the other side. So for your writing process, how does the idea of the chorus, because

...