eye Agitprop TO GO
SF Mime Troupe turns 60 with new touring show.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with the San Francisco Mime Troupe that its new summer show, “Treasure Island,” isn’t really an adaptation of the classic pirate novel. There are pirates involved, but the show focuses instead on the rapacious development on San Francisco’s own Treasure Island, along with displaced communities and cover-ups of toxic waste and radioactivity. And like all of the Mime Troupe’s shows in recent decades, it’s a musical comedy.
This year marks the 60th anniversary of the Mime Troupe, founded in 1959 by R.G. Davis as a spinoff of the Actor’s Workshop. It soon became a commedia dell’arte-influenced protest
theater troupe. The Mime Troupe became a collective in 1970, and shifted more toward performing original satirical musicals in the late ’70s. In 1987 the troupe won the Regional Theatre Tony Award, the same award that TheatreWorks Silicon Valley won this year.
Every year the Mime Troupe premieres a new agitprop musical and performs it for free at outdoor venues around the Bay Area. It all requires a lot of discussion among the collective about what issue they’re going to take on that year and how.
“If we know it’s going to be a year where there’s going to be a major election, like next year, we’ll start talking about next year’s show this fall,” says frequent head writer Michael Gene Sullivan, playwright of this year’s show and one of its performers. “What’s the thing we don’t think enough people are looking at?”
Sullivan joined the Mime Troupe when it was touring with the production titled “Ripped Van Winkle” in 1988.
“I actually saw the troupe when I was in high school,” he says. “My father took me to a Mime Troupe show. And I just said, ‘Wow, that looks like the coolest job in the world.’ They’re up there telling power-challenging truth and it’s funny and musical and activist art in a very in-your-face kind of way. Once I became an actor I came in and auditioned, and they didn’t cast me. They were like, ‘You’re too young.’ And so the next time I came in to audition a year later, I wore the heaviest clothes I had, and I just decided to act tired the whole evening. And they were like, ‘You have matured so much!’ And so they cast me.”
Keiko Shimosato Carreiro, a longtime performer and costume designer in the collective, also costars in “Treasure Island.” Her first Mime Troupe show was the 1987 revival of 1971’s “The Dragon Lady’s Revenge.” Initially she opted not to join the collective, but when invited again — with 1988’s “Ripped Van Winkle” — she reconsidered. “I thought, OK, I can devote two years of my life to the San Francisco Mime Troupe, because it was a good place for me to develop different skills as a theater artist,” she recalls. “The first show I ever costumed was here at the Mime Troupe, and the first show I ever designed a set for was also at the Mime Troupe. Nobody else had ever asked me if I could do those things. And then it just kind of turned into 30 years, because it’s very addictive to be part of the creative process.”
“Treasure Island” director Wilma Bonet is a former collective member from the 1980s — “what I call the Tony years,” she adds with a laugh.
Before she joined in 1979, “I had my eyes on the Mime Troupe for a long time,” Bonet says. “The first time I came out to the Bay Area from New York, they were performing at Live Oak Park and they were doing ‘Dragon Lady,’ which was a play on the drug issue in Vietnam. And I was blown away by it. I said, ‘I want to do this.’ ”
When asked about hopes for the future of the Mime Troupe, the first thing all three say is that they’d love for it to tour nationally and internationally again.
“We haven’t done a national tour in over 15 years now, mostly due to funding,” Carreiro says. “When I joined the company, we toured every year. We did a spring tour, a fall tour and then the summer show. But for the past 10 years for sure, we’ve basically just done the summer show.”
“We want to be able to go and play in the Midwest to talk about factory closings, to talk about offshoring, to talk about climate change, and to be able to come to New York and talk about housing costs and a commitment to capitalism versus something that’s more equitable, and to go to Texas and the Southwest and do our shows about immigration,” Sullivan adds.
One factor is the Mime Troupe’s steadfast opposition to corporate funding that might compromise its mission to speak truth to power.
“We’ve had board members and past general managers going, ‘You’re tying my hands. We can’t do national or international touring unless you’re willing to take corporate funding,’ ” Carreiro says. “But I feel like that’s going to be the death knell for the troupe. It might become a different Mime Troupe that does get to tour and do international stuff, but if you ask me, then that company will be tying its hands by becoming a corporate mouthpiece.”
As for the future writ large, Sullivan puts it succinctly. “I always say, the long-term goal for the Mime Troupe should to help create a world where you don’t need a company like the Mime Troupe.”