LOS ANGELES -- Tim Robbins doesn't have much patience these days for labels. In case you haven't heard, the actor-writer-director has been called a lot of things this past year -- and not just a likely Oscar contender for his devastating performance in Clint Eastwood's "Mystic River." Robbins' outspoken opposition to America's foreign policy since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has landed him squarely in the sights of his conservative critics.

The name-calling began earlier this year when Robbins and his partner of 15 years, actress Susan Sarandon, lent their voices and celebrity presence to the growing anti-war movement at rallies and television appearances. "Just because I expressed my opinion, I've been labeled as all sorts of things, but that's (my critics') trip, not mine," Robbins said over the phone recently from Manhattan, where he and Sarandon live with their three children. It was a continuing conversation that had begun a few days earlier at the opening of his new play, "Embedded" -- a savagely witty commentary on the media frenzy accompanying the war in Iraq -- at the Actors' Gang Theater in Los Angeles.

Tim Robbins stands on the set of "Embedded" -- a play that focuses on the media chaos surrounding the Iraq War -- at the Actors' Gang Theater in Los Angeles. Photo by Jamie Rector, special to the Chronicle

Robbins got a shrill wake-up call last spring that falling out of step with the march to war would mean protesting at his own peril. A torrent of personal attacks against Robbins and his family intensified in the weeks after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March. He was accused by the right of being unpatriotic. A Saddam supporter. A protest junkie. Death threats arrived, and his 13-year-old son was dragged through the gossip pages. Sarandon's speaking engagement at a United Way conference on women's leadership was canceled. Then, in a widely publicized dust-up, the president of the Baseball Hall of Fame accused Robbins of putting American troops in danger by criticizing the war effort and withdrew his invitation to Robbins to come to Cooperstown for the 15th anniversary celebration of "Bull Durham.''

"It became so blatantly clear that what was going on was attempted intimidation," says Robbins, having had time to reflect on the backlash and what he thinks motivates those who see his public role as "actor-vist" as a dirty word. "The attacks are meant to make you feel isolated, to prevent others who feel in a similar way from speaking out against the war. My feeling is, when you allow intimidation to prevent you from expressing your opinions, then you might as well just give up your First Amendment rights."

Robbins admits that being lambasted as un-American was particularly tough to swallow. Despite his radical rep, he actually sees his penchant for democratically sanctioned dissent as every bit as all-American as his love of baseball. He says his moral compass has always guided him toward saying and doing what he thinks is right, to speaking the truth when he sees hypocrisy in the world, and he has trouble understanding why so many people take issue with the simple logic of his frankness.

"I think that if you believe something, and you have an opportunity in a free society to express it, then isn't that your responsibility as a citizen? If you're an artist, a writer, an actor, isn't that part of the deal? When the attacks started on my patriotism, that's when I went into high gear."

Robbins first channeled his anger into an eloquent speech delivered to the National Press Club in April, just three days after the Hall of Fame debacle. He cautioned that a "chill wind is blowing in this nation. A message is being sent through the White House and its allies in talk radio and Clear Channel and Cooperstown: If you oppose this administration, there can and will be ramifications." He urged journalists covering the war to live up to what he sees as the "awesome responsibility" of their trade and "insist that they not be used as publicists by this administration."

And then, Robbins says, he channeled his ire into his art, snapping back at his critics the old-fashioned way, in the tradition of the great 20th century playwrights of social conscience he admires, like Brecht and Büchner. "I started writing 'Embedded.' And it came really fast."

"Embedded," which Robbins also directed, is a very smart, very screwball and ultimately very chilling comedy, dramatizing the interactions of journalists and U.S. troops during the invasion of "Gomorrah," an oil-rich rogue state ruled by the "Butcher of Babylon."

In the play, Robbins asks some of the tough questions that are still being debated about the pros and cons of the Pentagon's strategy of "embedding" journalists with military troops -- about the public's right to hear bad news along with the heroic, and about the feasibility of filtering the real stories through the spin in a modern-day, televised-round-the-clock war. "I found the television coverage of the war depressing," says Robbins, laying the blame not on what he saw but on everything he didn't see. "It just got numbing because of the attempt to make it action-packed, when in fact you weren't really seeing anything and you were just being told what to feel. So I just read a lot."

Tacked to the Actors' Gang Theater lobby walls are front pages from foreign newspapers showing bloodier photos and more details of Iraqi civilian casualties than most American readers probably saw during coverage of the war at home. Robbins had little patience for the gung-ho reports from what he has called "19th Century Fox." CNN's "script approval" policy -- which dictated that all CNN reporters had to send their copy to anonymous officials in Atlanta to ensure its suitability to be aired -- also takes a lashing in the play.

Robbins doesn't consider himself a satirist -- rather, something more like a dramatic reporter, holding a mirror up to a stranger-than-fiction world.

"I don't satirize the journalists," he says, then recites a line from "Embedded" that's pulled directly from the TV news during one of the first nights of heavy aerial assaults on Baghdad: " 'If you don't have goosebumps now, you'll never have them in your life.' That's directly off the Fox News. That's not satire. That's reportage."

"Embedded" examines not only the discrepancy between the Army's rah-rah briefings and the journalists' view of mayhem on the ground, but also the self- censorship that can result from reporters cozying up to the troops who are both their beat and their bodyguards.

Indeed, Robbins shows genuine sympathy for the journalists and the soldiers, who are portrayed touchingly kissing spouses and lovers goodbye before shipping out to the desert. He saves his ample scorn for the government leaders whose shifting rationales leading up to the invasion, he says, perpetuate the public's confusion about the war's inevitability.

The play's comic stroke of genius is a masked chorus called "The Cabal," the policy advisers and analysts in the Pentagon's "Office of Special Plans" - - with names like Rum-Rum, Pearly White, Woof, Gondola, Cove and Dick. ("I am not the one who named them the Cabal, by the way," Robbins is quick to point out. "Those guys in Washington call themselves that.") They sneer at reports of swelling peace marches, consult their Palm Pilots to find the best date to launch the invasion ("If we don't get this war started soon, we're going to have to compete with the NBA playoffs") and recite a litany of excuses for why none of them ever served in the armed forces -- a feature of the Bush administration that makes Robbins seethe.

"You've got middle-aged men who never served when they were young enough to serve in the armed forces now reaching their 50s and 60s and sending young men and women off to fight," says Robbins. "And most of those (soldiers) they're sending off to fight are poor. On top of that, for those 'chicken hawks' to accuse others of a lack of patriotism because they are asking questions about why it is necessary to put our young men and women at risk is for me another hypocrisy. They were elected to be representatives in a democratic society, and they are crushing democratic values when someone disagrees with them."

Robbins takes his constitutional right to question very seriously. And he has always seen theater as one of the best ways to ignite dialogue and debate. Just don't call what the Actors' Gang does "political theater." "I'm not even sure I would want to go see political theater," he says. "Our first responsibility is always to provide entertainment."

Many of Robbins' fans and, he says, even his Hollywood peers are surprised when they hear he works in theater at all -- and are even more amazed to learn he has written seven of his own plays and is the artistic director of a 99-seat warehouse theater company in Los Angeles.

"I can't tell you how many times I have gotten befuddled, confused looks from my colleagues in the film industry when I talk about the Actors' Gang," Robbins said in a speech to regional arts presenters in Long Beach in September. " 'Theater in Hollywood? Why are you doing that?' I guess the assumption with these folks is that theater is something you do until you become famous and then once again when you are famous for having once been famous. But theater for me has never been about fame. From the first it has always been about community."

Robbins founded the Actors' Gang with a group of drama buddies from UCLA in 1981, years before he became a movie star. They modeled their edgy agitprop aesthetic on the in-your-face antics of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and they shared what Robbins calls a "punk-rock sensibility." (In the program of "Embedded,'' Robbins dedicated the play to The Clash's Joe Strummer, who died last year.)

"Theater is an extremely responsive medium," says Robbins. "You can engage with the news and the stories that we're being fed that are affecting our perceptions of the world -- right now. I think we are living in iconographic times."

When asked if there have been ramifications to his career because of speaking out politically, Robbins says, "I think there would be even more (consequences) on me as a human being if I didn't. If you believe something and you sit on it, whether it's to further your career or to get more money, then there's no difference between you and a politician."

©2003 San Francisco Chronicle

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