Mime Troupe Research Articles

Something Beautiful and Powerful: Politics, Art, and Bread and Puppet Theater

Something Beautiful and Powerful: Politics, Art, and Bread and Puppet Theater

Treasure Island by Michael Gene Sullivan

Reviewed by: Treasure Islandby Michael Gene Sullivan Beth Wynstra TREASURE ISLAND. By Michael Gene Sullivan. Directed by Wilma Bonet. San Francisco Mime Troupe, Dolores Park, San Francisco. 09 2, 2019. Swindlers, buccaneers, corsairs: descriptors for marauders on the high seas, and, according to the San Francisco Mime Troupe, developers looking to build high-rise condos with sweeping views of those high seas. Taking inspiration from the Robert Louis Stevenson classic of the same name, the troupe's 2019 production Treasure Islandfocuses on real-life Treasure Island in the San Francisco Bay, an old naval base, exposed in recent news stories as a place riddled with radioactive contamination due to botched clean-up efforts by the US military. Treasure Island is also currently home to residents who cannot afford the enormous housing price tags of the city they gaze upon across the Bay and who most likely will be displaced again when a project for a ferry terminal, shops, and 8,000 homes, already in motion, comes to fruition. Treasure Island also promises to be a place hard hit in the wake of climate change and rising water temperatures. By linking these social and environmental crises to the familiar story of Treasure Island, the troupe demonstrates that a new kind of pirate and a new kind of island danger are no longer relegated to the pages of fiction, but rather are alive and well in the City by the Bay and thus deserve attention and action. With serious and significant problems plaguing Treasure Island, a poignant drama or even an opera might seem appropriate genres to tell the tale of this doomed locale. However, for the past sixty years, the troupe's Tony Award–winning recipe for inspiring action and social change is humor, over-the-top antics, catchy and original music, and melodramatic staging in a crisp, seventy-minute free show designed for their outdoor park audiences. The troupe's productions have investigated American policies abroad in The Dragon Lady's Revenge(1971) and Making a Killing(2007); feminism and gender equality in The Independent Female: A Melodrama(1970) and Knocked Up(1993); electoral politics in 1985(1984) and Red State(2006); and the changing dynamics of its home city of San Francisco in San Fran Scandals of '73(1973) and City for Sale(1999). Treasure Islandcertainly includes the troupe's distinct blend of elements: a song lyric includes "Pirates? Aye, and developers, one and the same, lad!"; and developers complain about being "stabbed in the portfolio" while they clash city plans instead of swords. The production also benefited from superb acting and inventive sound and costume design as it sought to blend Stevenson's classic tale with real-life crises. In its use of pointed humor and examination of problems that are far from over and thus need audience engagement and help, Treasure Islandis a proper 60th anniversary show. The troupe has long believed and demonstrated with its productions that humor is a tool of uniting an audience, for if spectators can laugh together, perhaps they can solve big social problems together too. Treasure Islandcertainly connects to the long legacy of significant political performance by the troupe. Michael Gene Sullivan wrote this year's production, with assistance from troupe members Ellen Callas and Marie Cartier. The tight and swiftly moving play, directed by Wilma Bonet, contains an array of characters who share names and characteristics to those in Stevenson's novel. Treasure Islandcenters on Jill Hawkins, an earnest civil servant in the office of San Francisco's Housing and Urban Development run by Ms. Livesey. Hawkins is startled when developers, with quite a bit of pirate bravado and swashbuckling, burst into the office, each demanding the support for their respective projects from Livesey. There is one project in particular that intrigues Livesey: residential units on Treasure Island. She assigns Hawkins to assess the viability of the project with a trusted land-use consultant named, piratically enough, L. J. Silver. Hawkins's trip to the island is full of adventure as she accidently meets a group of residents who describe the near-poverty conditions in which they live and discovers that Silver is really...

Plays from a Marxist Perspective: Interpretations and Misinterpretations of Dario Fo

R. G. Davis directed the first commercial productions of Dario Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist and We Won't Pay We Won't Pay!, both in Canada and the USA. In the context of the original close relevance of the plays to the political situation in Italy, he looks at how in the USA especially their force has been diluted if not extinguished by the imperative to conform to the inherent anti-communsm of American culture. R. G.Davis founded and directed the San Francisco Mime Troupe in the 1960s, and the Epic West Center for the Study of Bertolt Brecht and Epic Theatre at Berkeley in 1975. Later he returned to academia to study science and ecology, and visited Cuba to examine the culture of organic farming. He has contributed previously to New Theatre Quarterly and its predecessor, specifically on Fo in two articles for the original Theatre Quarterly: ‘Seven Anarchists I Have Known: American Approaches to Dario Fo’, in TQ 8 (1986), and ‘Dario Fo Off-Broadway: the Making of Left Culture under Adverse Conditions’, in TQ 40 (1981).

Mabou Mines: Making Avant-Garde Theater in the 1970s by Iris Smith Fischer (review)

Reviewed by: Mabou Mines: Making Avant-Garde Theater in the 1970s by Iris Smith Fischer Cindy Rosenthal Mabou Mines: Making Avant-Garde Theater in the 1970s. By Iris Smith Fischer. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. pp. 266. $60.00 cloth, $29.95 paper. Iris Smith Fischer’s monograph fills a significant gap in experimental performance history, as it is the first text dedicated exclusively to examining the work of Mabou Mines, one of the most important avant-garde theatre groups in the United States. Although the New York–based company received its first Obie (Off and Off-Off Broadway Theater) Award in recognition of its work in 1974, Mabou Mines came to prominence in the 1980s with groundbreaking productions such as A Prelude to Death in Venice (1980), script and direction by Lee Breuer, and Dead End Kids (1980), conceived and directed by JoAnne Akalaitis. Beginning with a clearly written and insightful introduction, the book is organized chronologically in five chapters, ending with a brief epilogue. Mabou Mines: Making Avant-Garde Theater in the 1970s also includes a section of excellent production photographs and a useful appendix with a timeline of members’ activities and company achievements, from 1957 to 1980. Writing about a group that “set out to create indescribable performance” (v), Smith Fischer carefully documents the first and lesser-known decade of Mabou Mines’s production history, beginning in 1970, when the company was supported in its first three years by Ellen Stewart, director of La MaMa Experimental Theatre, and then, over a ten-year period, by Joe Papp of the Public Theater. Smith Fischer weaves together accounts of core members’ artistic backgrounds as she tells the story of how Mabou Mines’s multidisciplinary performances came about. In her introduction Smith Fischer states that detailing company members’ biographies is not her intent here. Her focus is on the “coming together” of the multitalented founders, JoAnne Akalaitis, Lee Breuer, Philip Glass, Ruth Maleczech, and David Warrilow, and the group’s rehearsal processes and productions. Actors Frederick Neumann and Bill Raymond joined the group in 1971; Terry O’Reilly joined in 1973. Smith Fischer also suggests why some members had moved apart or left the group by the end of the 1970s. Smith Fischer argues that Mabou Mines rejected the notion of the actor as an interpretative artist, and instead, performers were seen as “creative agents” (1). This company of individual artists—“Co-Artistic Directors”—sometimes with disparate visions, often struggled with collaboration as they consistently “made new” and often provocative work together. The group ultimately evolved into what Smith Fischer describes as a “company of directors,” with Breuer [End Page 154] acknowledged as the “first” director and Akalaitis as “the second director” with a “sensibility and vocabulary of her own” (120). In the introduction, Smith Fischer situates Mabou Mines’s work in the 1970s within the context of longer, ongoing conversations in theater and performance studies about the avant-garde—or avant-gardes. In Smith Fischer’s analysis, the idea of and adherence to the “Avant Garde as Community” is crucial to an understanding of how Mabou Mines functions: members support each other through their efforts to create and foster a common language and techniques and through sharing responsibility (organizing childcare within the group is but one example). In the first chapter, “Coming Together,” Smith Fischer charts the complex movements of the couples, Breuer and Malaczeck and Glass and Akalaitis, from coast to coast in the United States and throughout Europe, where they encountered English actor David Warrilow. The five determined to make New York City’s downtown arts scene their base. In this section and throughout the volume Smith Fischer clarifies the connections and the distinctions between Mabou Mines and experimental theatre troupes associated with 1960s radicalism— the Living Theatre, the Open Theatre, the Performance Group, and the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Mabou Mines in the 1970s “was not political” (in Akalaitis’s words): “There was no ideal about politics, or what theatre should be, could be, or how we wanted to change it. . . . [The ideal was] excellence, and finding a performing technique that was American—one that was personal, yet very stylized and technical” (35). Working...

A Director's Journey from Performance Art to Ecological Aesthetics

R.G. Davis founded the company that became the San Francisco Mime Troupe as an experimental project of the Actors' Workshop in 1959. He left the Troupe in 1970, formed the Epic West Center in Berkeley for the study of Bertolt Brecht and epic theatre, and became a pioneering director in the United States successively of the plays of Brecht and Dario Fo, on which he wrote in the original Theatre Quarterly 40 (Autumn–Winter 1981) and in New Theatre Quarterly 8 (November 1986). In this article he traces the course of his subsequent career in creating experimental storytelling events and, via an interlude garnering academic qualifications, into the field of ecological aesthetics, which he defines as ‘a Brechtian aesthetic and ecological socialism interrogating each other within a scientific ecological conception of nature’. The present article is based on a lecture he gave in June 2013 at Stanford University.

MABOU MINES’S STAGING OF REVISITED: Ruth Maleczech, Samuel Beckett, and Holographic Visualization

Although the American avant-garde company Mabou Mines's with Samuel Beckett's early plays and David Warrilow and Fred Neumann's presentations of Beckett's prose for the stage are better known, in the early 1980s, founding co-artistic director Ruth Maleczech (1939-2013) sought and received permission from Beckett to stage his short prose fiction Imagination Dead Imagine. The production premiered in 1984 at the Performing Garage in New York City's Soho, home to the avant-garde company The Wooster Group. In combining Mabou Mines's tradition of performing a playwright's text with their innovative use of technology, Maleczech's production transformed the relationship between actor, audience, and performance and provided the company with a new take on staging Beckett.Maleczech had her first taste of Beckett at the San Francisco Actor's Workshop, the first theatre in the United States to produce his plays, where she worked for several years in the 1960s. In her chapter on the company's history with Beckett, Ruby Cohn notes that the San Francisco Mime Troupe (then the R. G. Davis Mime Troupe), with whom Maleczech collaborated during her years in California, also worked with Beckett's texts during Maleczech's time there. Describing the various European theatrical influences on the members of Mabou Mines, Cohn suggests that evolved an approach to acting that [Lee] Breuer called Mr. [sic] Outside (Brecht) combined with Mr. Inside (Grotowski). Less schematically than this contrast would suggest a Beckett play became the linchpin of their exercises - Play, the very play that occasioned Beckett's own step into a new dramatic phase (219; 'sic' in the text). Cohn also refers briefly and approvingly to Maleczech's production of Imagination Dead Imagine (231-32).Prior to Warrilow's highly praised interpretation of Beckett, the actor collaborated with Maleczech, Breuer, JoAnne Akalaitis, and Philip Glass on the production of Play during their Paris days. Work on Play began as an experiment in acting, one that would help them to work their way through and beyond realism (Cohn, 219). Although Cohn credits Breuer with this initiative, according to Maleczech on Play began shortly after she and Akalaitis returned from the south of France and taught what they had learned there to Breuer and Warrilow (2011-12). This recollection suggests that the search for a non-realistic approach was a group endeavor, in which each individual collaborator was already engaged. In Maleczech's case, the journey had begun when she sought out visual artists such as Judy North (then Davis) and musicians such as Pauline Oliveros in San Francisco in the 1950s.Before beginning her directing career, Maleczech performed in a number of Beckett's works produced by Mabou Mines in the early seventies, including Come and Go and Play (both in 1971). Vanishing Pictures was Maleczech's debut as a director, premiering in 1980. As later with her staging of Beckett's short fiction, Maleczech participated significantly in her first production's design, for which she and Julie Archer won an Obie Award.1 Maleczech's second directing project, an adaptation of Jim Strah's detective novel Wrong Guys for the stage, premiered in 1981. Having established an important precedent for translating prose for the stage with this adaptation, Maleczech quickly followed it up with Imagination Dead Imagine, her third directing project.2 The Strah project also highlights the kind of multi-media performance that Maleczech would exploit in Imagination Dead Imagine.Wrong Guys was not recorded on video, but the photographs show a highly visual interpretation experimenting with Archer's designs of light and shadow, a technique Maleczech utilizes in Imagination Dead Imagine. This production also featured the kind of careful and subtle use of props that would reappear in Maleczech's treatment of the bier in Imagination Dead Imagine, in this case with naked light bulbs, beer cans, a bathtub, and a typewriter in a set design by Michael Kuhling. …

“Fun, Yes, but Music?” Steve Reich and the San Francisco Bay Area's Cultural Nexus, 1962–65

AbstractThis article traces Steve Reich through the Bay Area's cultural nexus during the period 1962–65, exploring intersections with Luciano Berio, Phil Lesh, Terry Riley, Robert Nelson, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and the San Francisco Tape Music Center. The aim is to present a revised history of this era by drawing on personal interviews with Tom Constanten, R. G. Davis, Jon Gibson, Saul Landau, Pauline Oliveros, and Ramon Sender. In addition, previously unused source materials and contemporaneous newspaper reception are employed to provide a more nuanced contextual framework. Reich's heterogeneous activities—ranging from “third stream” music and multimedia happenings to incidental scores and tape collage—deserve investigation on their own terms, rather than from within narratives concerned with the stylistic development of “minimalism.” More appropriate and viable aesthetic parallels are drawn between Reich's work for tape and Californian Funk art.

21st-Century Brecht

Research Article| May 01 2011 21st-Century Brecht Philip Glahn Philip Glahn PHILIP GLAHN is an assistant professor of critical studies and aesthetics at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (2011) 38 (6): 12–15. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2011.38.6.12 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Philip Glahn; 21st-Century Brecht. Afterimage 1 May 2011; 38 (6): 12–15. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2011.38.6.12 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAfterimage Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2011 Afterimage/Visual Studies Workshop, unless otherwise noted. Reprints require written permission and acknowledgement of previous publication in Afterimage.2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Reich in Blackface:Oh Dem Watermelonsand Radical Minstrelsy in the 1960s

AbstractThis essay undertakes an examination of Steve Reich's music for Robert Nelson's filmOh Dem Watermelons(1965), which was originally conceived as part of the San Francisco Mime Troupe's controversial productionA Minstrel Show, or Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrelof the same year. Reich's long-neglected soundtrack deserves reconsideration for its formative role in the development of the composer's musical style and quasi-liberationist aesthetic at the time, for its participation within what I term the “minstrel avant-garde” in the Bay Area during the mid-1960s and the postmodern revival of blackface minstrelsy more generally, and as a reference point in reflecting upon Reich's professional and political trajectory since its composition.

Peter Whitehead's <i>The Fall</i> Revisited

Peter Whitehead's The Fall Revisited Marjorie Rosen (bio) Within its first two minutes, Peter Whitehead's The Fall lets us know that it is a movie on amphetamines. From the get-go, images hurtle across the screen: a young woman's eye, heavily made-up and fringed with spidery false lashes; a bomber jet; a musician singing about soldiers and war; an Italian bombshell, the selfsame owner of that eye, watching television. Then there are strobe lights, a belly button, and a bare female breast. A British filmmaker talks on television in a reedy voice about coming to New York to make a film about America. ("Sometimes outsiders see us with a much clearer light than we see ourselves," he confidently tells a TV interviewer.) A pretty woman—oh, it's Gloria Steinem—says, "This must be the best covered war in our history." I am trying to imagine how this feverish two-hour film—"a documentary based on a fictional script," Whitehead calls it in the opening credits—must have played when it first debuted in 1969. Most likely, it astonished audiences with its throbbing electronic rock score and kaleidoscopic hip images, cut together practically at the speed of light and both anticipating and outdazzling the MTV generation. Having seen The Fall only recently, I respect it for this pulsating imagery and for Whitehead's audacity at trying to juggle both documentary and what he claims are fictive forms to come up with something fresh yet rigorous, something popular yet intellectual, and something that is not just politically and cinematically subversive, but also brimming with personal anger and angst. He clearly owes a great debt to the French director Jean-Luc Godard, whom he has described as a personal hero, and to Godard's mid-sixties movies such as Made in U.S.A. (FR, 1966); Masculin Feminin (FR, 1966), which Godard described as being about "the children of Marx and Coca Cola"; [End Page 480] and the postmodernist Pierrot le Fou (FR, 1966) and La Chinoise (FR, 1967), with its ebullient Marxist sloganeering. Perhaps, too, Godard's offscreen intoxication with his leading lady and future wife, Anna Karina, inspired Whitehead to go forward with his own onscreen story of a director who romances a model he has just hired to pose for him. But what charmed us so much about Godard in those years was that he could achieve a goofy and occasionally soaring mix of cultural touchstones, political outrage, and heady romance; such lightness eludes Whitehead, whose work, despite its energy, is strained by its own self-importance. How to describe The Fall? For one, it is an antiwar tract, which very likely borrowed its title from Albert Camus's final work (Whitehead indeed quotes the French author and philosopher during the proceedings: "Albert Camus said that when everyone is guilty, it will be a democracy"). The movie is, in unequal parts, the story of a filmmaker observing a strange culture in furious flux and a document of the chaotic political events in America in 1968, from the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy to the student protests at Columbia University. For all the movie's style, it has significant problems. The first is its lack of focus, which Whitehead himself seemed to acknowledge when, five minutes into the documentary, he flashed this title card onto the screen: "Film as a Series of Historical Moments Seeking a Synthesis." Yes, but it never finds that synthesis. What's more, many of its moments are not all that historic. They emerge a hodgepodge of strobe lights and cultural and political images—the San Francisco Mime Troupe and Bread and Puppet Theatre, both doing anti-Vietnam riffs; speechifying by Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy; a man, identified as a potential assassin, flinging a white chicken around a room and eventually killing it; a staged scene of dancers in a subway car, pointless except for the presence of then-model and flower child Penelope Tree. Indeed, it is not until the film's final half hour that Whitehead introduces his most compelling and original material: the Columbia University student protests of April 1968...

Paso del Norte

Carlos Morton is a leading Chicano dramatist, who has been writing and producing plays for more than four decades. Among his best-known plays are The Many Deaths of Danny Rosales (1983) and Johnny Tenorio (1992). In addition to his work for the stage, which has been widely produced, he has written for television and radio, and taught at universities in Texas, California, and Mexico (he holds a PhD from the University of Texas, Austin). When he started his career, at the end of the 1960s and the start of the 1970s, his enthusiasm was sparked by the political theatre produced by Teatro Campesino and the San Francisco Mime Troupe. His work has since adopted a wider variety of styles and themes: evoking historical events, myths, biblical stories, and contemporary political issues, such as racism and machismo, interweaving realism with fantasy. But he always addresses a Chicano audience, and exposes the oppression of Chicano and Latino people. He is currently Professor of Theater at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

On Collaborating: An Interview with José Cruz González

FALL 2009 159 On Collaborating: An Interview with José Cruz González Susan Vaneta Mason José Cruz González is a playwright, director, musician, lyricist, creator of the Hispanic Playwrights Project at South Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa, California, and Professor of Theatre Arts and Dance at California State University, Los Angeles. His parents and grandparents were farm workers and he grew up on California’s central coast. He went to college during the Mexican American Civil Rights movement where he was among the first generation of Chicano Studies students who defined and shaped Chicano theatre. González has a prolific career as a writer of youth and adult plays and has received numerous awards (Kennedy Center, NEA, TCG and others). During his development as an artist and throughout his professional career with commissions by numerous theatre companies, he has been committed to exploring diverse approaches to artistic collaboration. González’s latest play, Sunsets and Margaritas, was recently produced at the Denver Arts Center in Colorado. Susan Mason is González’s colleague at California State University, Los Angeles. She has collaborated with him on professional and academic projects. When and where did you first begin studying theatre? I did my undergraduate work at University of California San Diego in the late 1970s where I majored in U.S History/Chicano Studies and minored in Theatre. Why theatre? I knew I wanted to go to graduate school and thought theatre would help my communication skills. So I began by taking beginning, intermediate and then advanced acting. Eventually the teacher asked me to help coach ac- 160 LATIN AMERICAN THEATRE REVIEW tors. I was also tapping into the creativity in my childhood: painting, sketching, making things with my hands. How did theatre and Chicano Studies come together for you? Were you aware of Chicano theatre at that time? I first became aware of Chicano theatre by taking a class at UCSD from Jorge Huerta. We studied Teatro history and read plays. With that course I found my calling. Besides that, companies such as Teatro de la Esperanza toured to the university with bilingual productions. I also got to see the work of Carlos Morton who was an MFA student there. He had worked with the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Tony Curiel was a graduating senior who went on to Stanford and then El Teatro Campesino. Silvia Cortez, Olga Villanueva, and Goyo Flores, a Vietnam vet, were undergrads in the program. So I got involved with the teatro group Jorge created on campus. After UCSD I went to Arizona State University and worked on my MA in theatre. I poured over everything I could find on Latino theatre, the history of the movement, when, how, Nuyorican writing. I started a teatro there. We performed with local actors and created some of our own work. At this time my focus changed to directing. I directed The Hands of God by Carlos Solórzano that became my thesis project. I was also introduced to theatre for young audiences. At that time my overall goal was to work with El Teatro Campesino or Teatro de la Esperanza: to take my training and experience back to the theatre. So after ASU, I applied to the MFA program at UC Irvine for more training in directing. What kinds of directing opportunities did you have when you completed your professional training at Irvine? How did your employment at South Coast Repertory (SCR) come about? While I was at Irvine, I had a summer internship with El Teatro Campesino. I also directed a student production of a Mexican play, Los Fantoches (The Effigies), that we took to the Edinburgh Festival. At Irvine I also worked with EOP [Education Opportunity Program] that had participated in a project called Second Lives at South Coast Rep. Second Lives was about immigrants and refugees of Orange County. I met with the project director, Michael Bigelow Dixon who invited me to assist him at SCR. And that lead to full-time employment at SCR? I began reading plays in Literary at SCR while I was still a student at Irvine. And I directed a play, Terra Nova, in a black box theatre...

The Age of Jackson: George Jackson and the Culture of American Prisons in the 1970s

Between his first national exposure as a Brother in early 1970 and his violent death in August 1971, George Jackson achieved an almost unprecedented level of celebrity for an incarcerated person. In that age of political extremes and radical chic, it is not altogether surprising that Jackson achieve notoriety and acclaim. However, there has been little attention to the prison culture that helped shape Jackson's consciousness. In addition, the weeks and years that followed Jackson's death saw a remarkable series of protests where prisoners specifically memorialized Jackson. By placing Jackson's ideas, writings, and actions in the popular, political, and prison contexts, this article argues that Jackson was a key participant in debates over incarceration, colonialism, and racism. While he is often only remembered for the ideological extremes of his book of letters, Soledad Brother, and his violent tactics, George Jackson has not been recognized for his participation in an organized system of covert education that presaged theories of internal colonialism, his popularization of arguments about the political qualities of incarceration, and insistence that prisoners can contribute to movements for social change as symbols, intellectuals, and leaders. It is telling that the largest and most visible prison rebellion of the era occurred on the other side of the country only weeks after his death. While others have noted the connection between Jackson and Attica, the specific tactics and demands of the Attica Brothers have been described as strange or unrealistic. Once placed in the proper context of the prison culture of the 1970s, their calls for unity, amnesty, and removal to a neutral-i.e. postcolonial and Marxist-country seem far from outlandish. Rather, they seem like a claim very much situated in the political culture and climate of American prisons of the 1970s. George Jackson provided the inspiration for a generation of incarcerated intellectuals and writers to insist on the importance of their perspectives in shaping public debates over a host of key issues. Though it would be hard to overestimate the influence of Malcolm X and Angela Davis on the cultural and intellectual output of incarcerated people during the 1970s, the brief, intense, and uncompromising revolutionary life of Jackson made him the icon for a range of critics of the prison system. Jackson as Symbol Bertold Brecht's 1930 script for calls for the set to be hung with placards containing quotes by Marx and Lenin. In productions of the play between 1973 and 1975, the San Francisco Mime Troupe substituted quotes by George Jackson and Richard Nixon, personifications of the extremes of 1970s-era political activism. Troupe, founded in 1959, had a well-earned reputation for antiwar, feminist, and anticapitalist sentiments. Even if the audience members were unaware of the substitution, they would have easily seen the ideological and political message the Troupe sent. Where Brecht's notes called for a projection of Marx's Theory turns into a material force once the masses have understood it! Mime Troupe projected Nixon's Communism is evil because it defies God and denies man (Gordon 101). Where Brecht included Lenin's Prove that you can fight! the Mime Troupe substituted Louis Farrakhan's All of us are in prison. Those locked up are merely in solitary confinement. Where Brecht's script called for a repetition of Lenin's line later in the play, the Mime Troupe invoked a letter George Jackson wrote to his mother: You are free-to starve. Written during the Great Depression, The Mother dramatizes the political transformation of the mother of a communist. At the play's opening, she is an antagonist of revolution. At its end, she is a revolutionary. In the program notes, the Mime Troupe made clear their belief that Depression-era calls for revolution applied to the 1970s context: The San Francisco Mime Troupe decided to do because of the present crisis in America. …

Abilities Festival: A Celebration of Disability Art and Culture 2005

The Abilities Festival: A Celebration of Disability Art and Culture made its Toronto debut 27–30 October 2005. This project of the Canadian Abilities Foundation involved four days of multidisciplinary work by artists and performers from around the world. In addition to the gala performances, art exhibitions and concerts, the event included a series of panel discussions and workshops, which covered such broad-ranging topics as storytelling for children, broadcast journalism and career advice for artists with disabilities. Artistic director and producer Sharon Wolfe explains that the interaction made possible by the festival fosters a climate of inclusivity and understanding, as the participants build “bridges that will lead to inclusion. Bridges that will reduce attitudinal barriers and negative perceptions about people with disabilities, bridges that will lead us all to an enriched appreciation for the full spectrum of creative talent that exists here and beyond” (1). These points of contact were directly enabled by the liveness of the festival. Theatre with a Difference, the gala evening held at the Glenn Gould Studio, showcased bold pieces by Chaika, a dance—mime troupe from Moscow; Max Fomitchev, a mime artist from Vancouver who was born in Russia; and American humorist David Roche. Within the live performance setting, there exist tensions, pressures and reactions that serve, in this case, to reveal buried assumptions about persons with disabilities. The festival not only promotes a thriving and creative disabled culture by example but, through its live performances, is able to draw out hidden attitudes so they can be recognized, confronted and ultimately transformed.

Nickel and Dimed (review)

Investigative journalist and author Barbara Ehrenreich's non-fiction best-seller about the impossibility of surviving on low-wage service jobs appeared in bookstores just as the U.S. boom economy went bust; her timely account of the three months she spent in three different states struggling to survive as a member of that exhausted and often invisible workforce has brought renewed attention to the problems of low-wage workers in America. Upon hearing an interview with Ehrenreich on National Public Radio, artistic director Bartlett Sher of Seattle's Intiman Theatre secured the rights to create and produce a dramatic version of her odyssey, and he hired Joan Holden, principal playwright of the San Francisco Mime Troupe for thirty years, to write the script. Nickel and Dimed, the Intiman's first commissioned world premiere since 1988, opened for a month-long run in July 2002; before the run had concluded, the company received an invitation to take the production to Los Angeles, where it opened the 2002-2003 season at the Mark Taper Forum. While Sher envisioned an opportunity to focus his audience's attention on working-class community members whose labors, in Ehrenreich's conclusion, subsidize the lives of the middle and upper classes, he was also attracted by the proven dramatic device embedded in the story: a character, disguised as someone else, embarks on an adventure in strange territory and ends up learning more about herself and about society.

A Taste of Tibet: The Nuns of Khachoe Ghakyil Ling Nunnery and the Theatre du Soleil

A performance of Tibetan music and dance by the nuns of Khachoe Ghakyil Ling nunnery at the American Museum of Natural History invites a comparison between this event and a theatrical production about Tibet by the French theatre company Theatre du Soleil. Although the political plight of the Tibetan people shapes the daily lives of the nuns, it is not overtly addressed in their performance, which sets the viewer up as a removed observer of Tibetan culture. The Theatre du Soleil's production, by contrast, foregrounds the political issues and involves the audience on every level in a cultural exchange that is, nonetheless, fictional. The comparison addresses questions of cultural authenticity, the ability of performance to bring the spectator to political engagement, and the relative contributions of cultural performance on the one hand and theatre on the other.

Festive revolutions: the politics of popular theater and the San Francisco Mime Troupe

Festive revolutions: the politics of popular theater and the San Francisco Mime Troupe

When Post-Realism (And the 1960s) Came to Iowa City: An Afterword

YOU MIGHT SAY that Trouble-Making Fiction, or what we then called post-realism, and what nation later called the 1960s, all arrived in Iowa City on same date, Friday afternoon, October 20, 1967. occasion was a conference called The New Grotesque, Or, Is There a Post-Realistic Fiction? and scene was antiseptic ballroom of Student Union, where Richard Poirier, author of A World Elsewhere, a study of style in American Literature, was lecturing on The Literature of Self-Parody. With a polished combination of learning and humor (befitting editor of latter-day Partisan Review), Poirier had quoted examples of intentional stylistic excesses of Henry James, James Joyce, and Norman Mailer, attacked modern writers who made formal issues of fiction into subjects of fiction, and then started a long aside on Jorge Luis Borges, describing him as pre-eminent post-realistic author: a philosopher and novelist and jokes ter whose entire work was an examination of world as fiction and reality in fiction. But Poirier was over his allotted time, and expressions on many faces said, as they do in Iowa City when professors from East or West tell them what they already know, Does this guy think we've never heard of Borges? Everyone was also waiting for next event, a Eulogy to Lenny Bruce, by man who was in a way martyred sick comic's heir, Paul Krassner, editor of underground satirical magazine?the dirty, deadly opposite of Partisan Review?The Realist. Then doors at back and sides of ballroom opened quietly, and in came members of San Francisco Mime Troupe, dressed in white sheets and holding candles. Chanting and moaning like monks, they came forward and formed a line across front of room. There, solemn and defiant, they blocked off stage and barred anyone from going up to stop or rescue suddenly distressed but still lecturing lecturer. Who did quickly slip on stage were Ronnie Davis, Mime Troupe's director, dressed in blue jeans and denim shirt, and Paul Krassner, also in jeans and jean jacket. There were a few brief words, no scuffle, and off went

Non-Traditional Casting Update: Multicultural Casting Providing Opportunity for Minority Actors While Stimulating Innovative Productions

have a multiracial culture everywhere in the country except onstage, declared San Francisco Mime Troupe resident playwright Joan Holden. Producer/director Michael Schultz, echoing Holden's comments, noted that Interestingly, a lot of corporate America is beginning change its complexion, but that hasn't filtered into the [entertainment] industry yet. These comments from participants at the Non-Traditional Casting Project Symposium held in Hollywood on II October 1988 (see Variety, 19 October 1988) are assessments of the state of integration in the professional American theatre. According information released at the symposium, 90 percent of the productions in the U.S. are staffed, cast, and directed by Anglos, mostly males. Actors' Equity statistics indicate that while minorities account for about 17 percent of the population nationwide, fewer than I2 percent of the roles in regional theatres and about 6 percent of the roles on Broadway are filled by minority actors. Is this much ado about nothing? I think not. We should have a fully integrated theatre in the United States-we do not. The purpose of the theatre has always been, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up nature. But the reflection we see in the current American theatre is highly unrepresentative of the world in which we live. A more accurate reflection is possible through multicultural casting. The following is a statement of our casting policy and a description of what we have accomplished at Texas AM or (b) representational plays in which we have the option of casting minority actors because a certain ethnicity will enhance the character and convey the playwright's ideas more effectively; or (c) presentational plays where, since there is no attempt recreate a realistic picture of life, color blind casting can be practiced. In the casting of representational plays (realistic or naturalistic drama) there are many characters who could well be portrayed by people of various ethnic backgrounds, thus creating characters who extend and enhance the playwright's vision by giving the characters greater dimension and the play more resonance. In the case of most presentational plays (classic, neoclassic, and expressionistic drama) there is little or no attempt at realism. In

Deep Culture: Thoughts on Third–World Theatre

Does vague approval for the social objectives of much third-world theatre blind sympathetic western observers to its defects? And, where those objectives are specifically socialist, are the complex dialectics which generate revolution too readily supplanted in favour of simplistic affirmation? R. G. Davis takes examples from his own experience in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Algeria to propose a closer, more active, and inter active attention to the relationship between theatre and national needs, based in a lateral approach to what theatre can and cannot do well. R. G. Davis was founding director of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and is currently teaching at San Francisco New College, while working on two films and a book. He has been a regular contributor to Theatre Quarterly and NTQ – most recently, on ‘The Politics and Packaging of Performance Art’ in NTQ13 (1988).