Common Ground: Backstage with the SF Mime Troupe

August 2005

Backstage with the SF Mime Troupe

What goes into a Mime Troupe play — besides six months of intensive labor? Join Common Ground for an inside look at the collective’s creative mayhem.

by Gar Smith

It’s a hot Saturday afternoon in the Mission, and I’m about to watch a sneak preview of the new SF Mime Troupe (SFMT) production. Inside a cavernous rehearsal hall, Stage Manager Karen Runk is apologizing — they’re having some problems. “We won’t be doing the first scene,” she confides: it’s being rewritten. And there’s no music, because the composers are still creating the songs. The costumes aren’t ready either. The props haven’t built yet, and the script is being revised on a daily basis.

With less than a month before the show’s Dolores Park debut, things are looking a tad sketchy for the July 4 opening. On the other hand, this is the Mime Troupe, and they’ve been pulling rabbits, agit-prop vaudeville, and street theater mayhem out of their collective thespian hat for 46 years.

A dozen SFMT members surround a large table covered with scripts, beer bottles, a Spanish-English dictionary, and some Indonesian dance videos. The far wall is covered with a gallery of oversized masks and a husky mutant corn costume. “We don’t do pantomime,” the Troupers insist. “We are satirists. We produce shows that debunk the official story.” Case in point: their new play — Doing Good.

A Proud History of Trouble-making

The concept was inspired by John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, the tell-all memoir of a US agent whose mission involved bribing foreign leaders to undertake costly development schemes for dams, roads and ports. When the countries are forced into debt, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) swoops in, offering loans in exchange for US access to local resources. Not exactly Marx Brothers fare, unless you mean Karl, but for nearly a half-century, such quirky, improbable subject matter has been the Mime Troupe’s stock-in-trade. And they are very good at it.

SFMT was born in 1959 at the Actors Workshop when R.G. Davis began experimenting with commedia dell’arte, the street theater of the Italian Renaissance. Shortly after the Troupe’s first outdoor show in Washington Square Park in 1962, SF officials arrested Davis on an “obscenity” charge and banned the company from performing in public. In 1964, the Troupe won the right to return to the parks where its shows remain unabashedly political.

In the mid-’70s, the SFMT became a pioneering multiethnic ensemble and staged a production of Bertolt Brecht’s The Mother that cemented the group’s international reputation. Their 1974 play, The Dragon Lady’s Revenge (an exposé of the CIA’s role in the heroin trade), won the Troupe’s second Obie award. The glowing reviews from New York were matched by glowering reviews from Washington. In 1990, the government pulled the Troupe’s federal arts grant, forcing the company to cut back its summer tours. (The Troupe now devotes those lost touring weeks to tutoring at-risk youth in theater skills.)

From Book to Script

Victor Toman, a veteran of El Teatro de la Esperanza and the Berkeley Rep, is directing his first Mime Troupe play. “We try to give everyone a chance to direct,” Toman explains. If more than one person wants to direct, it’s put to a collective vote. “It’s a big challenge directing something as it is being created,” Toman says. “As a director, you’re supposed to have a clear view of the characters, but, here, the characters actually change in the process — it’s always changing.” (Visualize trying to direct the American River during spring flood.)

“In January, we started a series of intensive all-day meetings, looking for ideas. One concern was electronic voting machines. Then there were the big-picture questions about why so many people around the world hate the US.” SFMT vet Dan Chumley had read Confessions, and he prevailed on Joan Holden (the author of 30 SFMT plays) to hone the script. After several teams of writers worked on different ideas, a five-person team, headed by Holden, nailed down a draft. Each member then worked on a different section of the play with Holden supervising.

Now it’s early June, and Toman turns to address the assembled actors: “Let’s read the new version of the script — which is one hour old.” At Toman’s cry — “And-a one, and-a two!” — the show begins. Tall, square-jawed Noah Butler springs to life, chopping the air with his hands and bellowing his character’s opening speech about motorcycling cross-country towards ‘Frisco “with my lady on the back!” Another actor interrupts: “Wait! My script doesn’t match.” Chaos ensues. Everyone seems to have a different version. Toman plunges his head into his hands. “Stuff it!” he sighs, “Let’s do Scene Two. Everyone on their feet!”

The actors leap to the floor, passing beneath a tethered trapeze bar to take positions in front of a plywood backdrop. For anyone who has watched the Troupe perform in costume, it’s disconcerting to see these larger-than-life actors shuffling around in tattered T-shirts and cargo pants.

As a collective, SFMT supports multi-tasking. Keiko Shimosato arrived in the Bay Area in 1987 aboard a horse-drawn carriage. In the intervering years, she has served the Mime Troupe, as actor, costume designer, writer and director. During today’s rehearsal, the mercurial, cricket-quick Shimosato will morph into a rich Ecuadoran, a peasant woman, an Indonesian street vendor, the haughty wife of a Hong Kong investor and a Savak enforcer working for the Shah of Iran.

Michael Gene Sullivan, a suave, golden-throated veteran of more than 20 SFMT shows, plays Ray, a former National Security Agency operative dispatched to Ecuador to “help the poor” with a large development project. The year is 1987, and Ray is making a pitch to James (Noah Butler) and Molly (Liza Hori-Garcia), two kids from the Sixties who have been toiling in the jungle village of Pobre. Mollie joined the Peace Corps to do good : James joined to beat the draft.

“I’m working for Gain Corps,” Ray announces. “It’s Gain Korp !” someone shouts from the table. “‘Gain Core’ sound like it’s French.”

“Do you speak Italian?” Ray asks James. Butler replies with a flourish: “Abastiantemente, bene!” Another shout from the table: “It’s ‘a bastante’ !”

Ray and James engage in a verbal sparring match that elicits guffaws, but when Butler punches a line with a swashbuckler’s sword thrust, Toman interrupts: “Could you hold the lunge until after the line?” They try it again, and Toman’s right: The delayed thrust works like a visual rim shot. Alas, this bit will ultimately be cut from the final production.

Next, Ray argues that pushing a stretch of the Trans-Andean Oil Pipeline through the mountains will bring prosperity to Pobre. Molly angrily slams an empty prop beer bottle on a table and stomps off in a rage. Her physical reaction was so convincing I could swear I smelled the spilled beer.

Hori-Garcia begins a new scene and blows her line, “Fudge!” she stamps. “I always mess up that line.” She retreats to the wings and prepares to re-enter. She takes four steps onto the stage and begins laughing helplessly. On the third try, she hits the stage and nails the line flawlessly. She’s angry and convincing. There’s no question: at this moment, she’s no longer Lisa: she’s Molly.

After James is persuaded to join Gain Corps, he and Mollie jet to Indonesia, where Christian Cagigal’s comic cabbie, Haj, points out the sights. Suddenly Haj falls to his knees in front of the spot where a CIA-backed coup triggered a civilian massacre. “So many people die here,” he laments. (Nearly 500,000 were killed in 48 hours.) Haj invites James and Molly to a traditional dance depicting “the battle between good and evil.”

The actors all took Indonesian dance classes to prepare for this show-stopping performance which features a wildly mugging Sullivan stomping the Earth as a menacing monster, swallowing entire countries. “Ecuador!” “Indonesia!” “Iraq!” “Vietnam!” (Vietnam, however, proves indigestible.)

James’ ill-fated career as a Multinational Hit Man also takes him to Teheran, where another CIA-backed coup toppled Mohammed Mossadegh, Iran’s democratically elected leader. As a cynical Gain Corps economist, James is making good-money-for-bad-deeds, but now he’s alone. Molly has discovered that Gain Corps’ “development” plan for Ecuador was a fraud. The roads were built, but Pobre was destroyed and its people displaced, leaving the land covered with toxic oil and the rich-poor gap grown to a chasm. In exasperation, Molly screams: “Why is it, wherever Gain Corp. goes, there’s a CIA coup and the US winds up getting more oil?”

Inside Mime

It’s break time, and Toman pushes his fingers through his long, black hair as he sizes up Adam Woolley, a 20-year-old student from Boston.Woolley is looking for summer work, “even if you only wanted to pay me $12 an hour for two hours a week.” Sensing a lack of interest, Woolley changes tack, flashes Bambi eyes at Toman and pleads: “Please-please-please?”

“We’ve already got all the help we need.” Toman replies. Woolley is crestfallen but quickly asks if he can work for free.

“The new prop person we hired could use some help,” Runk suggests. “Can you paint sets?”

“Anything!” Whoolly whoops. “Working with the Mime Troupe is something I’ve always wanted to do! But if I’m going to work without being paid,” he adds, “I want to be really involved.”

“That’s refreshing,” Runk laughs. “It’s usually the other way around.” Woolley beams and Runk winks back: “We might even feed you.”

Runk gives her new “slave” a tour of the Troupe’s Treat Street HQ, squeezing through the Salvation Army-like costume room en route to the adjacent prop shop where a pair of burly woodworkers offers quick handshakes. Outside, the Mime Troupe truck is parked amidst tools and props. “We do an incredible amount of schlepping,” says General Manager Peggy Rose. “Interns and volunteers help but everybody shares the work. That’s what it takes to bring theater to where the people are. By the end of the tour, we are very tired of schlepping.”

Finally, Runk brings Woolley to the heart of Mime-land — a hidden, open-air mini-park that sports a full-fledge wooden stage. This is the legendary hollowed ground where every new show premieres for an exclusive audience of former Mime Troupers. “They watch our show, and then tear it apart,” Runk laughs.

Gold from the GeMimeSchaft

The Saturday run-through ends abruptly with James beaten and left for dead by two thugs from the Shah’s secret police. “We won’t be doing the closing scene or the epilog today,” Runk apologizes. Butler has to grab his bags and run off. “He’s performing in another play,” Toman explains. “It’s closing this week.”

Unfortunately, not even the core group of Troupe vets can survive on their earnings from pass-the-hat performances. Cagigal, for example, earns extra bucks working as a magician. Toman jokes that he’s seeking work as the “first male waiter at Hooters.” And Shimosato’s secret life? “I’m a mother,” she grins. “The mother of a four-year-old demon!”

It takes a lot of long, unpaid hours to pull off these free Mime Troupe shows each summer, so the next time that passed-hat approaches, remember the old adage: “Mime does not live by Brecht alone.”

As cars creep down Mission Street, I’m listening to a KCBS interview with Jim Schultz, executive director of the Center for Democracy. The interview underscores the timeliness of the Mime Troupe’s message. Schulz is explaining what’s behind recent street protests over natural gas in Bolivia: “The country’s natural resources used to belong to the people,” Schultz says. “Ten years ago, the IMF pressured Bolivia to open the oil and gas to foreign ownership. The native population wants these resources re-nationalized to benefit Bolivians, not Chevron, Texaco and BP,” says Schultz. “The people are just asking for simple justice.”

Thank goodness, someone is Doing Good.

Gar Smith, Common Ground’s Associate Editor, may be the only journalist ever handcuffed and arrested for posting a Mime Troupe poster in Berkeley.

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