"It's our fault," Holden says, referring to the company's name. "We should have changed it." Founded in 1959, the Mime Troupe performs mime only in its original meaning, "the exaggeration of daily life through story and song." In actuality the group uses a variety of theatrical approaches: commedia dell'arte, slapstick, vaudeville, melodrama, Noh, and so on to satirize multinational corporations, landlords, developers, even the World Trade Organization. They do speak, and sing, and dance. In fact, the one word that can't be used to describe the San Francisco Mime Troupe is "silent." Over the years any number of zealous prosecutors, incensed police, enraged citizens, craven politicians (and, most likely, disgruntled pantomime lovers) have tried to shut the SFMT up. In the sixties, troupe members suffered arrests and lawsuits, and today the company endures a lack of funding brought on by right-wing attacks on the NEA. But the Mime Troupe-an artistic collective with no director-has never wavered in its commitment to social justice and entertaining theatre.
The Mime Troupe's connection to Reed goes back to its beginnings. The second item in its official chronology reads: "May 20-22, 1960: Performs at the Pacific Coast Arts Festival, Reed College; Arthur Holden (student) chairman." Arthur Holden '58 was a chemistry major who performed in plays; through him his then-wife Joan, an English major, was drawn into the theatre. Up to that point, she says, "I didn't do theatre, but I read a lot of plays, a lot of MoliŠre." Arthur, who joined the Mime Troupe after graduation and retired only a few years ago as a principal member, eventually got Joan to write plays for the company.
But it didn't happen immediately. After graduating from Reed, she took a stab at graduate school, but, she says, "I utterly hated it, was totally miserable. . . . There were so many smart people who were into being literary critics. I thought it was the cool thing to be. The really high-status thing was to be a professor." She smiles, a bit mischievously. "I realize, looking back, the place in the economy Reed occupies. Harvard turns out rulers, the people who run things. Reed turns out . . . civil servants and college professors."
| "There's not a contradiction between passion and critical thinking.You really can be passionate and keep a clear head at the same time." |
The career as a novelist didn't work out ("I never finished anything") and she turned to journalism, a longtime career aspiration. But when an article for the radical Berkeley Barb was rejected, another opportunity arose. "Ronnie Davis (the Mime Troupe's founder) was looking for someone to adapt L'Amant Militaire," she says. "And my husband said, `Oh, my wife can write.'" Thus began her 32-year stint at the Mime Troupe.
Her adaptation of L'Amant Militaire, an 18th-century commedia by Carlo Goldoni, is a freewheeling farce that can safely be described as zany. Updated to reflect the Vietnam era, it delivers a generous portion of antiwar agitprop leavened with Pythonesque silliness; it's the kind of play in which Punch the puppet will exhort the audience in no uncertain terms to resist the military draft and, moments later, complain about someone's hand being up his pants. (Disgusted with the audience's passivity, he eventually leaves "for some country with a good puppet government.")
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