Pedals power feisty lampoon
Troupe cycles Trump satire around Santa Rosa
The Imaginists’ annual summer tour, “The Art Is Medicine Show/El Show el Arte Es Medicina,” doesn’t actually tour very far. No stop is more than a couple of miles from the experimental theater company’s home base in downtown Santa Rosa. But that doesn’t mean the journey isn’t a major feat: It’s all done by bicycle.
That includes not just the actors (who are both professionals and high school interns), but sets, props, costumes and makeup for this year’s script, called “Stop That Show!” — an agitprop comedy lampooning President Trump. To haul everything, bikes have
front and rear trailers. A side-mounted trash can becomes a makeshift pannier. (“Some people still use it that way, to my chagrin,” says actor Eliot Fintushel of the cask’s original purpose.) One bike was custom-built to haul the company’s puppet stage. Another’s a tandem, acquired last year for an actor who couldn’t quite learn to ride in time for the show.
“In 10 years, we’ve probably taught 10 people how to ride,” says coartistic director Amy Pinto, who founded the company in 2002 with her husband, Brent Lindsay.
On the Friday, July 21, ride to Bayer Park and Neighborhood Gardens, some riders are more expert than others. On inclines, some dismount to use what cyclists call the two-foot gear. Some of the cumbersome vehicles require the two-foot gear to round tight corners.
“It’s like trial and error, but real time, in traffic,” says actor Rachel Quintana. In all, the pace rarely breaks 5 miles per hour. (By contrast, the SFMTA assumes a moderate 13 miles per hour in the green wave for bikes on Valencia Street.)
If you ride with the company (and each year the public has an open invitation to do so), it’s like you’re part of a circus rolling into town — the motley fleet of vehicles, the matching orange reflective vests, the way neighborhood people in their front yards wave hello, the way cars stop to let the whole clunky caravan pass.
That’s at least how most trips go. Once, as the troupe got lost — “we were bicycling for about an hour,” Fintushel remembers — Pinto’s appendix burst. Another time, the cops pulled them over and gave them a stern talking-to about biking in the dark sans bike lights.
Now, the Imaginists ride all decked out in high viz, or safety gear. They’ve even done a show on bike safety, called “Captain Bicycle Shorts,” which they toured to local schools.
Lindsay and Pinto came up with “free, bilingual, bicycle-powered theater” during the Great Recession, inspired by the Federal Theatre Project of the Works Progress Administration. They wanted to give audiences something for free, something that would “lift spirits,” Lindsay says. The name “The Art Is Medicine Show” is inspired by “the old medicine shows that would go out by wagon.”
In February, when the pair were in San Francisco workshopping “The Magic Circle Cycle” at Z Space, Lindsay said that since the Imaginists’ founding, “there has been an attention to what is not happening in the theater.” He says the North Bay doesn’t have the same commitment to new work as the rest of the Bay Area: “We have 15 theater companies do the same shows.” The result is that audiences, especially younger ones looking for adventurous fare, have “been repelled.”
Physically traveling out of the Imaginists’ building into the community explicitly welcomes those audiences back in. So does seamlessly weaving in Spanish translations of almost every line, as well as a few jokes you might miss if your Spanish is rusty. But even that choice is a call for radical inclusivity. At a play in California in 2017, why should English be the default?
At Bayer Park, neighborhood residents return the welcome, feting the Imaginists each year with a potluck. As actors stake their minimal set into the ground and change into their costumes inside portable toilets, they also chat up their audiences over quesadillas, barbecue and pasta. A few feet away, an ethnic dance troupe rehearses, blowing into a conch shell, noisemakers rattling on their ankles; in a nearby lot, roosters crow. In this noisy, wide open lawn, backstage is no more than a frame of mind: Actors warm up in full view of the audience. But that’s also part of the design. “We are all Imaginists,” Quintana says, by way of a curtain speech.
The show, which finds in Trump a too-apt vehicle for a retelling of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” delivers on that promise of making the audience a part of the art (even if some plot threads, including one involving Mother Earth, don’t cohere). At the height of the villainy of President Corn (Lindsay, caked in neon makeup) and his sidekick Sen. Graham Cracker (Fintushel), the show stops, and the ensemble invites the audience to create their own ending to the story — a reminder that politics isn’t some nebulous external force that acts on us, but a story we daily write, whether through action or inaction.
In another group’s hands, that device might be hokey, but the Imaginists earn the right to use it by avoiding pedantry and keeping every scene gleefully silly. Particularly delightful is Lindsay’s caricature of Trump — he nails the pursed lips, the ceaseless vacant squint. To Trump’s Queens accent, he adds notes of a Porky Pig or Mike Tyson timbre, making for an exquisite rendering of the line, “Where’s my big-boy podium?”
It’s as apt a crystallization we’re likely to get of the sorry state of our executive branch — hopefully one that will merit a victory lap in next summer’s bike tour.