Joan Holden, 85, her plays took satirical aim at power
To Joan Holden, a fiercely leftwing playwright for the awardwinning San Francisco Mime Troupe, life in a capitalist society offered almost too many targets: conniving politicians, laborsquashing industrialists, and masters of war looking to profit by spreading conflict around the globe, to name just a few.
As the theater collective’s principal playwright from 1967 to 2000, she largely trafficked in satire, collaborating on looselimbed lampoons and melodramas such as “Ripped Van Winkle,” about a 1960s hippie who conks out for decades after a monster LSD trip and awakens to find himself trapped in a nightmare of yuppie greed and materialism in the 1980s.
Even in the troupe’s broadest farces, the point was to make audiences chuckle their way to political enlightenment.
“I write plays about things I’m pissed off about, usually attacking people in power,” she said as part of a panel on humor in 1999, as reported in her obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle. She described humor as “the revenge of the powerless.”
“Physically, I can’t get at these people,” she said, but she “can expose them to ridicule. Maybe I can’t slay the dragon, but I can make him look silly.”
Ms. Holden was 85 when she died Jan. 19 at her San Francisco home. Her daughter Kate Chumley said the cause was cancer.
The Mime Troupe, which is still active, started in 1959, performing in parks throughout the city and in theaters around the world, including Cuba and East Germany. It adapted traditional commedia dell’arte, an improvisational genre dating to the Renaissance, to the left-of-center politics that have percolated in its home city since the Mime Troupe’s early years, in the beatnik and hippie eras.
The “mime” in the troupe’s name has nothing to do with Marcel Marceau; its ensemble productions could scarcely be more verbose, with abundant singing and pointed dialogue. Rather, the term was a reference to an earlier use of it, as “the exaggeration of daily life in story and song,” the group’s website says.
Audiences needed little background to figure out the group’s political leanings. “The Dragon
Lady’s Revenge,” for which Ms. Holden was chief writer, pulled no punches, postulating that the Vietnam War had been prolonged in part because government agents and their allies were profiting from drug trafficking in Southeast Asia. The play was awarded a special citation at the Obie Awards in 1973.
Another notable production was “Seeing Double,” which Ms. Holden wrote with nine others. That play, which was presented in New York in 1989 and earned an Obie citation, raised eyebrows as a musical sendup of IsraeliPalestinian tensions.
The plot involves two young men from California, a Palestinian and a Jew (both played by a single Black actor, Michael Sullivan). They head for Israel on “Trump Fly-by-Night Airlines” (a swipe at the future president, who was then a real estate developer often portrayed as a paragon of gilded capitalism) to place a claim on a disputed plot of land, only to encounter a hijacking plot by a group called the Smokers Liberation Lobby and a crash landing.
Reviewing the play for The New York Times, Mel Gussow called it “so evenhanded in its criticism as to offend extremists on both sides.”
To Ms. Holden, laughing itself could count as a subversive act.
“Comedy is an emotionally revolutionary form,” she said in a 1974 interview with Bay Area newspaper the Palo Alto Times. “Comedy usually shows the triumph of the underdog — the young over the old, the poor over the rich.”
Joan Ada Allan was born Jan. 18, 1939, in Berkeley, Calif., the elder of two children of Seema (Rynin) Allan, a writer and psychiatric social worker, and William Allan, an agricultural economist. The couple had met while working on an English-language newspaper in the Soviet Union in the 1930s.
Joan developed a love of theater as a youth when she saw plays produced by the San Francisco Actor’s Workshop, an incubator for the Mime Troupe.
She graduated from Berkeley High School in 1956 before enrolling in Reed College in Portland, Ore., where she met a fellow student, Arthur Holden, who would become a Mime Troupe actor. They married when she was 19.
She first caught a glimpse of the Mime Troupe at a festival on campus. “Something clicked,” the Chronicle quoted her as saying, “the amount of energy on the stage, the fun that people seemed to be having.”
After she graduated with a bachelor’s in English in 1960, she and her husband settled in Berkeley, where she was a graduate student in English at the University of California, before moving to Paris for two years.
Coming from a staunch leftwing family, Ms. Holden had no trouble fitting in with a group whose founder, R.G. Davis, had at one point attracted the attention of the FBI for voicing support for a revolution to bring down the social order.
In a 1972 interview with The Fresno Bee, she tried to walk back the comment, albeit in baby steps. “When Davis said, ‘We are trying in our humble way to bring about a revolution,’” she said, “what he meant was that the country and the world have to go through profound changes before it can hope to achieve justice.”
In addition to her daughter Kate, Ms. Holden leaves two other daughters, Sophie and Lily Chumley; her brother, Stuart Allan; seven grandchildren; and her longtime partner and the father of her children, Daniel Chumley, a member of the troupe. She and Arthur Holden separated in the late 1960s and later divorced.
Ms. Holden retired from the Mime Troupe in 2000, but she continued to write, including a dramatic interpretation of the 2001 book “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America,” Barbara Ehrenreich’s account of how she explored life on scant wages by taking jobs as a server, house cleaner, nursing home worker, and Walmart clerk.
The play was staged at the prestigious Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 2002. A review by Sean Mitchell in The Los Angeles Times noted that the theater had “done a daring thing: It has put a play on its main stage that attacks the economic privilege of 90% of the people who will see it.”