SF Mime Troupe’s ‘Too Big Too Fail’

SF Mime Troupe's 'Too Big Too Fail'

http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2009-07-30/article/33441?headline=SF-Mime-Troupe-s-Too-Big-Too-Fail-

By Ken Bullock Special to the Planet
Thursday July 30, 2009

Too Big to Fail, the San Francisco Mime Troupe's 50th anniversary
show, swings through Berkeley again this weekend, playing outdoors in
Willard Park Friday evening and Saturday afternoon.

It's a storytelling play, "in the tradition of the West African
griots," with song and dance, that follows a villager who takes a
loan from a new Wall Street subsidiary in his neck of the jungle to
become the Goat Lord of Kanabeedomo. Then economic downturn, symptoms
of investment bubbles, of pyramid schemes­and Filije is faced with
losing Bamusa the goat, his original, beloved collateral.

The troupe will perform Too Big To Fail at 6:30 p.m. Friday and at 2
p.m. Saturday at Willard Park, with other local performances at 7
p.m. Aug. 6 at Oakland's Lakeside Park; 2 p.m. Aug. 22 and 23 at
Berkeley's Live Oak Park; 2 p.m. Aug. 29 at Oakland's Mosswood Park;
and 7 p.m. Sept. 16 at Laney College in Oakland. All shows are free
and preceded by a 30-minute music set.

The show was written by Michael Gene Sullivan­who first saw the Mime
Troupe in Golden Gate Park as a teenager when he aspired to teach
history ("It was everything I wanted to do, in one event")­and Ellen
Callas, and features stage direction by Wilma Bonet and musical
direction by Pat Moran (who penned music and lyrics). It is the
latest and most topical offering of the Mime Troupe's mission­as
Sullivan put it­to challenge the stories of American-style capitalism.

That mission came with the founding of the troupe in 1959 by R. G.
Davis as a project of Actors Workshop, the seminal San Francisco
theater company. Davis, a student of dance and of the founder of
modern mime, Etienne Decroux (teacher of Jean-Louis Barrault and
Marcel Marceau, who played Barrault's father in Marcel Carne's film,
Children of Paradise), started a studio to explore mime and language,
eventually leading to shows in the style of Commedia Dell'Arte, the
Renaissance physical comedy with antecedents in the mimes of
classical antiquity.

Performing in the parks from the early '60s, the Mime Troupe found
itself in run-ins with the law, from obscenity busts for reciting
Jean Genet's "Chant D'Amour" to its civil rights satire A Minstrel
Show, immortalized in Robert Nelson's film, Oh Dem Watermelons. Davis
has spoken about the close collaboration at the time with now
well-known composers like Steve Reich and Morton Subotnick,
experimental poets, filmmakers and political journalists. Luis Valdez
left the company to found Teatro Campesino; Peter Coyote, a former
Digger, went into movies; Bill Graham, Mime Troupe business manager,
started his career as impresario staging benefits for the troupe's
bail fund. (Davis remembers seven busts, on various charges.)

Davis, who remains on the board of the troupe, left the company in
1970, partly in disagreement over a shift in style towards a kind of
musical comedy in the streets, what the Mime Troupe has performed
ever since. Joan Holden, who wrote about 30 plays for the troupe,
counters that "melodrama," as Davis characterized what succeeded
Commedia, was a more familiar American storytelling style with
"undreamed power" to put over the social issues the Mime Troupe
addressed, particularly, in the '70s, the Women's Movement.

Holden, director Dan Chumley and composer Bruce Barthol (once of
Country Joe and the Fish) typified the troupe's production team for
the closing decades of the last century; Sullivan, Velina Brown and
Ed Holmes are names more familiar to its audiences today.

The old timers exclaim over its unexpected longevity. But Sullivan
has expressed what may be the real heart of the company's continuing
mission: to contribute to the creation of a world in which the Mime
Troupe would be unnecessary. "We still have a long ways to go," he said.

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