Originally published in the Bay Area Reporter
“There’s a standard criticism that people make about us,” says Joan Holden, a member and leader of the San Francisco Mime Troupe from 1967-2000. “They say we’re preaching to the converted. Well, don’t the converted need to be inspired and animated? Evangelists don’t just try to convert nonbelievers to the gospel – a big part of what they do is hold revivals.”
Holden and her colleagues at the famously left-leaning agitprop troupe feel that if there was ever a time for their old-time non-religion to stir up existing believers and inspire them to action, it is now. Where the recent production of David Henry Hwang’s “Soft Power” at the Curran Theater imagined an America that, in wake of the 2016 Trump election, descended further into petty materialistic hubris, this year’s SF Mime Troupe show “Seeing Red” reaches into the American past to find potential for a more promising future.
“Seeing Red,” which begins on Ohio’s midterm election night in 2018, tells the story of Bob (Lisa Hori-Garcia), an unemployed lesbian steelworker who voted for Trump after he promised to bring industrial jobs back to Ohio. Disillusioned by politicians’ broken promises, she vows never to vote again, and submerges herself in floodtides of beer.
But then along comes Joe (Andre Amorotico), a time-traveling musical mystery man who exposes her to the little-discussed big successes of the International Workers of the World in early-20th-century America.
Any prescriptive, medicinal qualities of the show are tempered by a spade full of sugar: the Mime Troupe’s traditional commedia dell’arte mix of carnivalesque music, giant masks, corny jokes and physical slapstick.
“I had been reading a lot about grassroots American politics in the early 1900s,” says Nigerian-born Rotimi Agbabiaka, a performer in past Mime Troupe shows whose personal research inspired him to write this year’s script. “I had never known that there had been this incredible movement through which people really made change happen in the U.S.: women’s right to vote, overtime pay, child labor laws.
“In Nigeria we felt the effects of politics in our daily life,” says Agbabiaka, whose family immigrated to Texas when he was a teenager. “We had been under a military dictatorship, there were riots in the streets, coups happening. Political engagement was always seen as part of artists’ responsibility.
“We were always asked to give input as performers,” says Agbabiaka about his past years’ work with the Mime Troupe. “So I thought I’d propose writing a show based on what I’d been learning on my own this year.”
Holden, who had been the head writer on several troupe shows in the past, took him under her wing, helping him crystallize his ideas into a format that would work for the Mime Troupe.
“I needed to understand that to make a show work outdoors in the parks, the presentation needs to be big and broad and simplified,” he recalls. “I had been doing so much research and uncovering so many interesting stories. But to connect with audiences in these public situations, I had to make everything simpler and clearer, to have really big characters in zany situations with comedy and music.”
Further development, casting and rehearsal began back in January, with “Seeing Red” finally rolling out across the Bay Area earlier this summer.
Between now and Sept. 9, when the troupe’s season wraps up in Santa Cruz, free weekend shows will take place throughout the Bay Area, with three performances in San Francisco over the leftist high holy days of Labor Day Weekend: Saturday in Golden Gate Park, Sunday and Monday in Dolores Park.
“We get out there and tell the truth and have some fun,” says Joan Holden. “After the election in 2016, I thought it was the end of the world. But then I went to the Women’s March in D.C., and that changed my outlook. There was a lot of anger, but there was also a lot of joy and solidarity. That’s similar to what seems to happen at these shows.”
