Described by the San Francisco Examiner as "an enormously talented and versatile ensemble with a genius for refreshingly engaged political humor," The Actors' Gang was founded in 1981 by a group of renegade theatre artists including artistic director and Academy-Award winning actor Tim Robbins. The ensemble has produced 68 plays and won more than 100 awards as well as acclaim for their interpretations of Shakespeare, Brecht, Moliere, Aeschylus, Ibsen and Chekhov.
Father Daniel Berrigan, SJ, was ordained to the priesthood in 1952 and began to play an instrumental role in the national peace movement in the early '60s as part of Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam, which also included his brother Philip and Yale chaplain William Sloan Coffin. In early 1969, Berrigan and Boston University professor Howard Zinn went to Hanoi as representatives of the antiwar movement to welcome the North Vietnamese government's goodwill release of three captured U.S. flyers. A poet, essayist and playwright, he won the Lamont Poetry Prize in 1957 for his first book of poems, Time Without Number. The Trial of the Catonsville Nine was written following the Catonsville Nine action, while he was a fugitive; it debuted at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 1971.
