S.F. Mime Troupe’s Treasure Island’ fares better as lecture
In a speech after the opening performance of the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s “Treasure Island,” actor and playwright Michael Gene Sullivan railed against a litany of housing woes.
We push the poor and people of color out of their homes, away from the center of our cities, to our “most dangerous,” our “most poisonous” land, he said, only to kick them further still when even that toxic real estate becomes desirable and profitable.
It was a stirring, righteous tirade, one that summarized the same issues covered in the show itself, which casts real estate developers as pirates in a fight over San Francisco’s Treasure Island, with one “simple civil servant” from City Hall caught between capitalist greed and plebeians’ need.
Unfortunately, the tirade was also more stirring than — and almost as substantial as — the show that preceded it. It was a show that marks the 60th anniversary of the Tony Awardwinning company, and whose Thursday, July 4, performance in Dolores Park launches its annual twomonth tour throughout Northern California.
If you already believe that City Hall needs to work harder to build safe and affordable housing for its artists, its caregivers, its teachers and everyone else who makes less than $90,000 per year, “Treasure Island” will reaffirm that notveryradical belief for you without complicating it. It asserts that even though city planner Jill Hawkins (Lizzie
Calogero) is no saint — she’s made mistakes in her past — she’s still allowed to be a progressive. She’s even allowed to fight for vulnerable Treasure Island residents. It says that the rich want to get richer, that citizens need to keep an eye on the people who govern and that some people who seem to be good might be bad.
In the midst of all these uncontroversial propositions, “Treasure Island” also asks if we should be more suspicious of the safety of the isle formerly owned by the Navy after Tetra Tech EC, the same company accused of fraud in its radiation testing and cleanup at the San Francisco Shipyard development, did analogous work on Treasure Island. But the show gives even this more provocative notion such cursory treatment — a stat here, a whatif there — that it’s not clear how much it’s supposed to matter, how much you’re supposed to care.
The Mime Troupe’s veterans of broad physical comedy occasionally enliven this flaccid material. In a sword fight made out of developers’ blueprints rolled up and brandished as weapons — the show’s one brilliant theatrical gesture — Keiko Shimosato Carreiro wields hers, one above the head, one out in front, like a bounty hunter lying silently in wait. As a cartoon of a pirate, Andre Amarotico is a live wire, each realization or change of status another spasm, a new explosion of sparks. Sullivan, as a pirate turned castaway, is such a master of stage business that he makes entering a scene and setting up its furniture into the most dynamic, most sharply defined moment in the show, which he wrote with Ellen Callas and Marie Cartier.
But performers also fumbled their lines and cues on opening day, and music was sung by either inexpert vocalists or those whose timbres are silken elsewhere but strained here. It’s the kind of show where a character makes a reference to the president, and then there’s an awkward beat, and you realize that you as audience are supposed to supply a kneejerk boo or hiss the show hasn’t quite earned, drawing on a relationship it hasn’t yet established with the crowd.
The Mime Troupe is a venerable Bay Area tradition, and they merit our congrats for enduring for 60 years as the representative of the far left on our stages. But if everything a show has to tell you can be conveyed in a minutelong lecture, why do you need a show to do the telling?
Michael Gene Sullivan, as a pirate turned castaway, makes entering a scene and setting up its furniture into the most dynamic, most sharply defined moment in the show.