San Francisco Mime Troupe has the audience ‘Seeing Red’
Like clockwork, every July the San Francisco Mime Troupe unveils a new musical comedy political satire that tours Bay Area parks with free shows. This year, the Tony Award-winning theater collective marks its 59th season with “Seeing Red: A Time-Traveling Musical.”
It’s the first troupe show written by collective member and frequent performer Rotimi Agbabiaka with help from Joan Holden, who was the acclaimed resident playwright for the Mime Troupe for more than 30 years but hasn’t been involved in its 21stcentury endeavors until now. The last show Holden wrote for the troupe was “City for Sale” in 1999; since then she wrote plays such as the much-produced “Nickel and Dimed.”
Agbabiaka wrote and performed the solo shows “Homeless” and “Type/ Caste,” and he has been seen in plays at California Shakespeare Theater, Marin Theatre Co., Shotgun Players, Magic Theatre and American Conservatory Theatre as well as in the last several Mime Troupe shows.
“‘Seeing Red’ is about a Trump voter, a woman named Bob, who voted for President Trump in 2016 and is feeling a bit of buyer’s remorse two years later but also doesn’t feel like she has any other alternatives,” Agbabiaka explained. “She’s sinking into a pit of disillusion and despair when she gets sent back on a time-travel journey to 1912, when her town, which voted overwhelmingly for Trump, was a hotbed of the American Socialist Party. She encounters a cast of colorful characters that were part of that movement, and that encounter challenges her notions, gives her a new vision, an alternative vision, that she brings back with her to the present day and that sparks her to political activity.”
The inspiration for the play was a similar journey that Agbabiaka took. It did not involve such measures as time travel or voting for Trump, but a feeling his own disillusionment after the last election as a progressive somewhat alleviated by learning about
the once-thriving socialist movement in this country.
“At some point last year, I read this article about the American Socialist Party,” he said. “I never knew that there were over 1,200 Socialist officials elected in 1912 alone, and that Eugene Debs, the Socialist candidate for president, won 6 percent of the national vote and would win a million votes while in jail in 1920. I didn’t realize that places like Kansas and Oklahoma that are so deeply Republican now were some of the largest centers of the socialist movement, fighting for the rights that we take for granted today: The eight-hour workday, voting rights for women, the end of child labor. It expanded my notion of what had been possible politically in this country and what is still possible, I think. It gave me hope.”
When Agbabiaka approached
Holden for her advice with his story idea, “I thought, right on,” she said. “He’s a young guy, and he’s kind of having the experience now that the Mime Troupe of the ’70s had at the Bicentennial, when everybody was learning the left history that they hadn’t been taught at all. Rotimi, who was born in Nigeria, was learning a lot of this for the first time. I knew a lot of it, but his excitement about it excited me.”
“I’ve learned so much from her, and it’s been a joy working with her and learning from her years of experience,” Agbabiaka said. “We are a democratically run company, and we really try to create the show together. I don’t feel like this is my going up into the garret and writing this myself in isolation. This is very much in many ways a group creation, and that’s been wonderful, to bounce ideas off people and build this together.”
Holden said she’s enjoyed helping out after all these years with one of the troupe’s shows, where everything’s played very big and broad and fast by necessity.
“I love the form,” she said. “It’s like coming home for me artistically.”