The San Francisco Mime Troupe Reader

Introduction

Introduction I ‹rst saw the San Francisco Mime Troupe perform at the outdoor Saturday market in Eugene, Oregon, in the late 1970s. The production, Hotel Universe , seemed right at home among the tie-dyed clothes, produce, and handcrafted goods for sale in the stalls there. At the back of the small portable stage, a colorful curtain bearing a cartoon painting of a hotel hung from a pole. The props and costumes were simple. The cast, comprised of seven actors, black, white, and Latino, played quirky caricatures of the elderly inhabitants of a low-income residential hotel and the nasty landlord trying to evict them. The style was broad and farcical. Actors sang and danced and talked to the audience while a small band played upbeat music. Spectators booed the landlord’s threats and cheered when Gladys, Myrna, and Manuel decided to ‹ght back, singing what would become one of the troupe’s most popular songs: “We Won’t Move.” The performance was free, and spectators , some with noisy, excited children, crowded around the stage. The spectacle gave me a new understanding of the power of “rough theater,” British director Peter Brook’s term for performances where audience and cast alike become participants in a raucous celebration of resistance. The San Francisco Mime Troupe is not silent. “Mime” in their title refers to ancient Greek and Roman mime—scenes and characters from everyday life performed in a ridiculous manner. Although the company has experimented with a variety of styles during its forty-‹ve-year history, ancient mime, with its exaggerated, highly physical acting style, has been a constant. Shows are colorful, noisy, and festive, often touching the same nerve that gives spectators the urge to run away and join the circus. Some have. Throughout the troupe’s history, their performances around the country have attracted new members. During the 1960s, the Bay Area was the heart of the American counter1 culture movement, with ›ower children in Haight-Ashbury, the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, and rock concerts in the Fillmore Auditorium . The San Francisco Mime Troupe was the movement’s theater. By the end of the decade, two national tours extended the troupe’s increasingly radical reputation across the country, where, in addition to performing, members participated in antiwar demonstrations and led protests. On two occasions, actors were arrested during performances, acts of censure that only added to the troupe’s reputation. The troupe is the longest-running political theater company in U.S. history , and their tenacity is part of their message. The company’s very existence is emblematic of their determination to keep on ‹ghting for human principles in a world that values pro‹t over people. Theater historians generally group the San Francisco Mime Troupe with other mid-twentieth-century ensembles producing original work: Living Theatre, the Performance Group (later the Wooster Group), Open Theatre, Bread and Puppet, El Teatro Campesino, and Mabou Mines, and in fact, three of these companies are closely related to the Mime Troupe. Mabou Mines, founded in 1970 by former troupe members Lee Breuer, Ruth Maleczech, and Bill Raymond, was in›uenced by the troupe’s early aesthetic experimentation. Bread and Puppet, an East Coast contemporary of the Mime Troupe founded in 1960, exchanged staging techniques with the group at the Radical Theatre Festival in San Francisco in the late 1960s. The third participant at this festival, El Teatro Campesino, had already been deeply in›uenced by the troupe’s style and politics. El Teatro founder Luis Valdez joined the Mime Troupe in 1965 after seeing them perform at San Jose State College. Valdez left later that year to work with Cesar Chavez organizing farmworkers in Delano, California , where El Teatro Campesino became the theater arm of the United Farm Workers union. The Mime Troupe takes its message of political empowerment and social change directly to the people. Their free performances in parks in and around San Francisco every summer since 1962 have become an institution, attracting as many as three thousand spectators to a single performance. Many audience members return year after year to have their politically progressive ideals reinvigorated. Some have grown up with the Mime Troupe, and now bring their children and grandchildren. Troupe founder R. G. Davis always insisted on theater unencumbered by ties to government and corporate funding, so after performances he would pass the hat for donations, a custom that has persisted to this day. For most of the 1960s the troupe survived solely on these personal...