It’s a short, five-minute walk from the greenway of San Lorenzo Park to the Riverfront Twin movie house in Santa Cruz. But culturally, the difference is so vast there might as well be an ocean between them.
San Lorenzo Park is the site of the annual visit to Santa Cruz of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the Tony-Award-winning theater company that has for more than 50 years presented edgy, often politically pointed agitprop theater to audiences around the Bay Area and the world.
But, American popular culture being what it is, the Mime Troupe’s fiercely held speak-truth-to-power aesthetic and its commitment to live theater the way it was practiced 400 years ago consign it to the far margins of the cultural conversation. in the real world, the Mime Troupe’s annual income is probably a fraction of what is spent on catering on the set of “Cowboys and Aliens” or any other forgettable speak-fantasy-to-the-powerless Hollywood bauble.
This weekend, the SFMT again comes to San Lorenzo Park in a production called “2012 “” The Musical,” and though that sounds like a high-concept farce featuring such well-known characters as Obama, Romney and Bachman, in fact, it’s something quite different.
“It’s about this kind of weird millenialism that’s going on these days,” said Michael Gene Sullivan, the show’s playwright and one of its lead actors, “from the Mayan prophecy to Jesus coming back. It’s really a parody of the media blitz that is designed to make people be afraid.”
It also deals with something very close to home for those who commit their careers to the low-paying “” indeed, sometimes, no-paying “” life at the SFMT. It’s about that eternal dance between art and money.
In recent years, the Mime Troupe, which was established in 1958, has presented such obvious political satires as “Too big to Fail,” “GodFellas” and “1600 Transylvania Ave.” The new play, however, addresses an issue that the Mime Troupe and arts organization like it have to wrestle with all the time: Is taking corporate money to do art a good thing or a bad thing?
The play is centered on a small theater company called “Theater BAM!,” which is doing what it feels is compelling, relevant theater, but is starving in the meantime. Then, in steps the offer of a new commission from a corporation that labels itself as “green” to create a new musical on 2012. The parody of end-time prophecy is actually a play within the play, staged by Theater BAM!
To dramatize the dilemma, the play sets up two sisters. The theater company’s fire-breathing artistic director Elaine believes flatly that all corporate money poisons honest art. her sister Suze, on the other hand, takes the opposite view, that money is the only way to reach an audience big enough for an arts organization to survive, and that the corporate trough is the only dependable source of that money.
The Mime Troupe itself does not take funding from corporate sponsors and depends on governmental organizations and private donations to stay afloat. The play’s director Wilma Bonet said the conundrum of taking corporate money has always been an issue for the company.
“It’s actually all arts organizations that are trapped by this problem,” she said. “You have to ask yourself, How do we say what we want to say if we’re being funded by money that may have strings attached?’”
Michael Sullivan has been the Mime Troupe’s resident playwright for 12 years, and has worked as a performer for more than 20 years. He said that the wormhole of corporate funding for the arts can go absurdly deep if you allow it to “” after all, a supposedly “pure” theater company would gladly accept money from paying ticket-buyers, but most of them probably draw a salary from those same corporations.
“I don’t think the question is where can you trace your revenues from, but why have we built a culture where you can only work for one of these corporations to begin with?” said Sullivan.
As a playwright working for a company that has no corporate ties, Sullivan has been free from the psychic pressure to pull your punches. Still, he said, it’s not easy writing political theater for general audiences. “You just can’t beat people over the head with your message,” he said. “Ultimately, it’s a play. It’s entertainment. You have to deliver something other than a diatribe. You have to look at it like comedy is the delivery system for your message.”
The SFMT is steeped in the tradition of commedia dell’arte, an Italian mode of theater popularized during the Renaissance that features broad comedy using outsized gestures with stock characters and melodramatic situations. Subtlety, in other words, is a no-no. That fact alone makes the commedia dell’arte style a fitting vehicle for political theater in which subtlety is also sacrificed in the name of coherence.
Still, it’s not the most lucrative line of work to go into, particularly nowadays. Director Bonet was a featured player with the Mime Troupe back in the early 1980s. she said the group found ways to spread its message on a shoestring budget, even going on world tours. Now, however, in these recessionary times, the group isn’t able to stretch its budget like it used to. The group still performs throughout the Bay Area, free to audiences, in public parks. After the performance, however, they will pass the hat for donations.
“Bad times hit everyone,” said Bonet, “but it hits arts organizations first.”
But, said Sullivan, politically charged art is still as much a necessity today as it has ever been. He likens the American capitalist system to a giant machine.
“It has its own impetus, and it cannot help but look at individual human beings as cogs and gears in a giant wheel. just like Charlie Chaplin did literally in Modern Times,’ political theater is all about how to stay human inside the machine.”
<a href="http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/localnews/ci_18753249tag:news.google.com,2005:cluster=http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/localnews/ci_18753249Thu, 25 Aug 2011 08:40:57 GMT 00:00″>Related Content
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